Sergei Markushev

Based on the play of the same name by I. Popov and L. Stepanov, staged by the State Academic Maly Theater of the USSR.

Police are detaining an opposition newspaper journalist on suspicion of murder. The prosecution's evidence is scanty and fragile. But a dirty political fuss has developed around this case. The fate and life of a person become the stake in the struggle for power.

The former artist, and now the director of the Glass-Porcelain trust, Fyodor Kudrin, saw an amazing engraving at the exhibition. The meeting with its creator turned Fedor’s life upside down.

On a gloomy March 1881, an old, sick man was dying in the Nikolaevsky military land hospital in St. Petersburg. Delirium tremens had done its dirty work: there was no hope for recovery. And this “old man” had just turned 42 years old, and it was the great Russian composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. Who knows what visions, what memories swarmed in his fevered imagination in rare moments of enlightenment?

Two village boys - brothers Semyon and Pavel - serve a Moscow merchant-shopkeeper. They face harsh exploitation and hard forced labor. The brothers' life paths diverge. Unable to withstand the merchant's bullying, Pavel goes to the factory, becomes a worker, and later a professional revolutionary. Semyon remains in service. In the post-revolutionary period, Semyon, having been to the front and returning to the village, joined the kulaks, brutally dealt with representatives of the Soviet government, becoming the head of a gang of “badgers” hiding in the forests. A Red Army detachment led by Pavel is sent to fight the bandits...

The hero saw among his colleagues a man whom he had met during the war in the dungeons of the Gestapo. This man reported that a thief from the same cell was trying to escape. The “thief” was shot, and later it turned out that he was the leader of the underground...