Nikolay Pazhitnov

A former aristocrat Ippolit Vorobyaninov leads a miserable life in Soviet Russia. His mother-in-law reveals a secret to him - she hid family diamonds in one of the twelve chairs they once had. Vorobyaninov in cooperation with a young con artist Ostap Bender start a long search for the diamonds.

Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from Switzerland, where he was treated in a psychiatric clinic. On the train, on the way to St. Petersburg, the prince meets Parfyon Rogozhin, who tells him of his passionate love for Nastasya Filippovna, the former containment woman of the millionaire Totsky. In St. Petersburg, the prince finds himself in the house of his distant relative – Lizaveta Yepanchina (General's wife), meets her husband, their daughters, as well as the Secretary of General – Ganya Ivolgin. The portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, accidentally seen on the general’s table, makes a great impression on the prince...

It is May 1912. Thirteen political prisoners are being tried in a naval fortress of Kronstadt. They are sentenced to death by hanging. A clandestine Bolshevik organization decides to free the prisoners during their transfer to the place of execution. Vasily Panin, a junker of a school of naval engineers, is one of those entrusted with this dangerous task.

A comedy about a naive young architect and his wild designs for a “New Moscow.” The Soviet censors weren't at all amused and shelved it.

Katusha, a country girl, is seduced and abandoned by Prince Nekludov. Nekludov finds himself, years later, on a jury trying the same Katusha for a crime he now realizes his actions drove her to. He follows her to imprisonment in Siberia, intent on redeeming her and himself as well.

The authors, like Isaac Babel, rejected the depiction of battles, the simplification, and varnishing of reality, instead conveying the dramatic tension of the post-revolutionary years: the explosion of awakened human energy and the tragic collisions of destinies.

Major timber merchant Yegor Bulychyov is terminally ill. In his house, he is surrounded by insignificant and greedy people, impatiently waiting for his death. Clever and insightful Yegor understands that he lived his whole life with strangers. He protests in his own way against the dissimulation and hypocrisy of the "masters" - the clergy, liberals, against the foundations of the bourgeois society that is going to collapse. Bulychyov's dying curse drowns his class in the powerful sounds of a revolutionary song.