Yuri Vyushin

The film is set in the 1920s. Shura Sevastyanov is an aspiring journalist in a small newspaper, with two-classes of a parochial school behind him. In the spirit of building communism, he is an ardent fighter against philistinism in all its forms. He denies the phenomenon of love, believing that it does not exist and that there is only friendship and sexual desire of man to woman.

A dying actor asks a doctor to help him commit suicide in return for a masterpiece.