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....
The illiterate kaffir Mpele receives a message from the prison farm about his... death, as well as the “property of the deceased”: a pipe, a pen and a notebook... The perplexed Mpele, who has never even been under arrest, turns to the police...
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...
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...
