Nikolay Pokrovsky marries his colleague Vera. Due to poverty, Vera is forced to sell pies. One day, she meets a wealthy American, Drayton, on the street. This first encounter is followed by others. At this time, Nikolai falls ill with consumption...
Director Alexander Panteleyev made cinema history as the creator of one of the first Soviet propaganda films, "Consolidation" (1918), based on a screenplay by Anatoly Lunacharsky. The plot revolves around a mechanic's family being moved in with a professor's family. Four years later, Panteleyev makes a film about a fatal betrayal that drives a valuable Soviet employee to the grave. On the streets of post-revolutionary Petrograd, an exemplary pre-revolutionary drama unfolds, featuring identity substitutions, seductions, falling into embraces, suffering, and madness. Framed by red stars and portraits of Marx, the plot takes on a particularly absurd quality
