In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair.

Lovely telegraph operator Masha Stepanova is a sanitary nurse. During a training alarm, she meets a taxi driver Alexei (Alyosha) Solovyov. He reads verses to a girl and invites her to the theater. But at the appointed time, Alyosha doesn't come, and Mashenka finds him, helps to recover. Young people fell in love with each other, but Alexei was too frivolous, and brings the girl a lot of sorrows and insults. Because of Alexei’s hobby for another girl, Masha breaks up with him. But she will be able to convey her faithful and true-hearted feeling through years of separation and the hardships of wartime, and when they meet again at the front of the Finnish War, Solovyov realizes what a gift of fate was meeting him with this girl.

The granddaughter Masha unexpectedly arrives at the home of Professor Okaemov. It is not easy for her to understand the complex, reserved nature of her grandfather. However, life, which entered the house with the arrival of the girl, cannot leave the old man indifferent. He finds joy and fulfillment in the newfound sense of responsibility for his granddaughter's fate.

A profile of the novelist and artist, his rich and productive life and a view of his working quarters in Montreux, for which the producer Robert Hughes went to Switzerland.

Vladimir Nabokov, widely considered one of the world's greatest writers, was also a remarkable professor at Cornell University. Here, Plummer portrays the witty Nabokov, providing an entertaining and insightful lecture upon "Metamorphosis," Kafka's bizarre story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a giant bug.