Ranks and People

The marquis de Granier would like his son Charles to end his current relationship for a respectable marriage. His younger brother Octave tries to help but Yvonne Lelys tricks him and he nearly leaves his family for the dancer. He even follows her to Constantinople. He falls asleep while writing to his father and dreams that he is a movie actor who, driven by poverty, sneaks into his father's home to rob him. As his father catches him, he kills him. Thankfully, it was all a dream.

With an international chess tournament in progress, a young man becomes completely obsessed with the game. His fiancée has no interest in it, and becomes frustrated and depressed by his neglect of her, but wherever she goes she finds that she cannot escape chess. On the brink of giving up, she meets the world champion, Capablanca himself, with interesting results.

Larisa Ogudalova, unlike her sisters, refuses to obey her mother's wish that she marry a wealthy old man in order to collect a dowry

History of theft and double crossing when two thieves fall out over the theft of the money of the proceeds of the sale of a house by a banker to a religious community.

A young man travels to Mars in a rocket ship, where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group with the support of Queen Aelita, who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope.

After the death of Count Chambery his wife and daughter were left without means of subsistence. Seeing no other way out, a young woman settles maid in the house of Baroness Angers.

While hosting a game of cards one night, Narumov tells his friends a story about his grandmother, a Countess. As a young woman, she had once incurred an enormous gambling debt, which she was able to erase by learning a secret that guaranteed that she could win by playing her cards in a certain order. One of Narumov's friends, Hermann, has never gambled, but he is intrigued by the story about the Countess and her secret. He soon becomes obsessed with learning this secret from her, and he starts by courting her young ward Lizaveta, hoping to use her to gain access to the Countess.

The story of Prince Stepán Kasátsky discovering his fiancée was the mistress of the Czar, so he then becomes a monk.

Smart Man Nassredin easily penetrates into Bukhara Emir inner circle posing as Wise Man from Damascus. He becomes Emir trusted advisor, and even convinces the tyrant to relax the rule and release a lot of political prisoners (because stars favor this arrangement).

A great stage performer falls ill and loses her voice and beauty, and she and her admirer's lives crumble because of it.

A young woman sharpshooter fighting with the Reds in Turkestan misses her forty-first victim, a handsome White lieutenant, and ends up escorting him, by boat, into captivity across the Aral Sea. A storm strands the two on an island.

The vain station master of a Russian train station out in the sticks has a quarrel with an old peasant woman and has her thrown in jail. The local party youth organisation finally manage to get her released, after having to cut through lots of red tape.

The secret police agent finds that factory director wife is counterrevolutionary but dies from the heart attack. The director reads the diary of an agent and turns his wife to police.

Based on Aleksey Tolstoy's piece of the same name.