Irina Likso

The film is a play about the collapse of the Vanyushins merchant family. The head of the family is a stranger to his children. The insight turned out to be cruel: sharp contradictions, anger, enmity, greed tear the family apart. Not finding a way out of this situation, he commits suicide.

Pensioner organizes a meeting of former classmates fifty years after graduating from school. Many are no longer alive, but those who came touchingly remember their distant childhood and youth, the joys and sorrows of bygone years.

The young composer Mikhail Glinka performs his new work at a soiree at earl Vielgorsky's house. However, the public is accustomed to Western music, and reacts coldly to the creation of the composer. This makes him very sad, but soon he decides to go learn the art of music in Italy. After returning from Italy, he is full of desire to write national Russian opera. Vasily Zhukovsky proposes a subject: a feat of Ivan Susanin. Tsar Nicholas I change the name of the opera to A Life for the Tsar and assigns a librettist - Baron Rosen. Acquaintance with the future co-author shocked Glinka: Rosen speaks Russian with a noticeable German accent. The premiere was successful, but Glinka was still not entirely happy with the libretto: "False words were written by Rosen". When Nicholas I learned that Ruslan and Lyudmila was written on Pushkin's subject, he sees it as sedition. The bitter experience of the composer brighten his supporters.

Performance at the Maly Theater from the novel by the Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.

The director's story about his life in the Soviet Union before his departure to Israel in 1971. The movie interweaves chronicle-documentary footage and fragments of Mikhail Kalik's films.

A production of the State Academic Maly Theater. The film, dedicated to the memory of Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky, includes fragments of plays based on the playwright's plays: "We'll settle accounts with our own people", "Thunderstorm", "Wolves and Sheep", "The Abyss", "The Snow Maiden", "The Heart is not a Stone", "It Shines but Doesn't Warm", "Mad Money", "The Truth is Good, but Happiness is Better", and "It's not all for naught".

Alexander Chatsky returns from three years abroad, hoping to rekindle a romance with his childhood sweetheart Sophie. In the meantime, however, she has fallen in love with Molchalin, her father's scheming secretary. As scandal erupts, Chatsky is met with accusations of madness.

In the boarding house of Wanda Ogrodskaya and her younger sister Anna, live the rich widow Sophia Parmen with her governess Yanina and the young lawyer Pyotr Bukovich, with whom all the women of the house are in love. Mrs. Sophia invites the lawyer to marry her, but is refused - Peter loves the dowry-free Anna. In revenge, Sophia gives a rich dowry to her governess, and Peter marries Yanina.