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....
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...