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.
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.
Genka Sakhnenko, a seventeen-year-old boy, has been passionate about pigeon breeding since childhood. But he begins to make a living, falls in love with the girl Tanya and realizes that it is time to leave his childhood hobbies.
