The film takes place between two revolutions - 1905 and 1917. There is no agreement in the family of the Kolomiytsev brothers, bankrupt nobles. The elder brother Yakov is mortally ill. The youngest, Ivan, a gendarme colonel, is completely confused and does not know how to get out of the situation created in the family.

The film is set in 1919. The film tells about an episode of the Civil War, when the troops under the command of M. V. Frunze took Ufa away from the White Guards.

The love triangle: wife, husband and his mistress, amusingly crumbles because the loving writer is fleetingly infatuated with a third woman, young and inexperienced, rightly believing that an artist needs a muse every day, not a wife and mistress.

Nurdin is a man who failed to protect friendship and love, who retreated before deceit and hypocrisy. The benevolent viewer is personified by the Old Man, a character who seems to stand outside the plot. Nurdin tells the Old Man about his life.

The film is about the dramatic events of the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution. Based on the play of the same name by Vladimir Bill-Belotserkovets.