Nikolai Yelizarov

His right hand having been wounded during the war, concert pianist Andrei Balashov is unable to perform his art. As a result, the young man feels so depressed that he considers his life wasted. One day, he decides to leave the capital and flee from the woman he loves, Natasha, a rising singing star. Andrei takes refuge in Siberia, his native land. Once there, he gets a job in a sawmill, where he entertains his fellow-workers playing the accordion during leisure hours. Some time later, Natasha and her company are expected in America where they are to do a tour. But an airplane breakdown forces the pilot to land next to the village in which Andrei lives and works...

Antonina Vasilyevna, as a member of the bureau of the district committee of the party, was instructed to save the Leningrad children, whom the war overtook in the suburban camps. She took them to the Kirov region. After twelve days of hard travel, the children arrived in the village of Supryadki...

The action takes place during the years of the Civil War in the Urals. It is difficult for the young woman Nadia Korneeva to make sense of the events unfolding around her. Having endured much grief and gone through numerous trials, she decides to join a Red Guard unit.

1935. Two families — Davydov's with three children and the newlyweds Lida and Dmitri Kashirin's — enter the new house on the outskirts of Moscow into a common communal apartment. The children grow up, and they and the adults around them are looking for their place in life, looking for answers to the questions of who to be and what to be, quarreling, making peace, building relationships, destroying them. Six years later, the peaceful lives of characters, with their joys and misfortunes, quarrels and reconciliations, and complex personal relationships, are blown up by a war that connects everyone at once, forcing them to see the meaning of their days, their attitudes to each other and their life values in a different way. For some of them, war is a fatal trait.

A Soviet dam project means that many old Ukrainian villages will end up under water. There are conflicts between the dam engineers and villagers who don't want to move.

Late one summer evening, another guest arrives at a cottage on the shore of a beautiful lake, where fishermen usually stay: Pal Palych. Soon, the hostess and all the guests begin to sense that behind his outward charm and empty pleasantries lies an indifferent and very selfish person.