The lack of spirituality and the limitations of the “respectable” bourgeois turn the values of art into a means of profit, into an object of vanity.

When Algernon discovers that his friend, Ernest, has created a fictional brother for whenever he needs a reason to escape dull country life, Algernon poses as the brother, resulting in ever increasing confusion.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Ermakov has come a long and difficult life path. At the age of nineteen, the student, the son of a worker, was sent on a Komsomol ticket to work in the Cheka. In one of the operations he was seriously wounded. And now, many years later, General Ermakov comes to Moscow and settles in the house where he spent his youth...