The film is a play about the collapse of the Vanyushins merchant family. The head of the family is a stranger to his children. The insight turned out to be cruel: sharp contradictions, anger, enmity, greed tear the family apart. Not finding a way out of this situation, he commits suicide.
The former artist, and now the director of the Glass-Porcelain trust, Fyodor Kudrin, saw an amazing engraving at the exhibition. The meeting with its creator turned Fedor’s life upside down.
In the boarding house of Wanda Ogrodskaya and her younger sister Anna, live the rich widow Sophia Parmen with her governess Yanina and the young lawyer Pyotr Bukovich, with whom all the women of the house are in love. Mrs. Sophia invites the lawyer to marry her, but is refused - Peter loves the dowry-free Anna. In revenge, Sophia gives a rich dowry to her governess, and Peter marries Yanina.
