Lidiya Rodionova

The heroes of the film are students of a pedagogical university, those who, after a year or two, have to carry knowledge to schoolchildren, "to sow the rational, good, eternal." In the meantime, student practice. True, the practice is not quite ordinary, because for the first time students leave far from the walls of their own university, for the first time they meet with students in the classroom not in the presence of their teachers, those with whom life encounters them daily at the institute, but with those who have been working for more than a year at school.

During lectures on literature, evening student Sasha Mukhin, a subway driver, sleeps and dreams. In approximate accordance with the subject of the lectures, he either tries to prevent Pushkin’s duel with Dantes, either intervenes in the events of Spartak’s rebellion, or is present at Galileo’s abdication, then meets a person from the future and learns from him his future fate.

The end of the 1940s. Test pilot Aleksei Kolchin was commissioned for the first time to fly the first Soviet jet fighter. The tests are successful, but it is necessary to improve the aircraft. When performing a test flight, Kolchin dies, his last words are recorded on tape. Having studied them, Kolchin's friend Sergei Sharov makes a new attempt and completes the test of the aircraft.

1941 year. The Siberian carpenter Kuzma Kroykov arrived in Moscow as part of a rifle company. In a line of fighters, he walked through the streets of Moscow at night and in a village near Moscow met Varvara Oknova. Resolute, tall and beautiful, she won his heart. But soon the protracted terrible battles for Moscow began...

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.