Anatoliy Toropov

Хмурый Вангур

Missing Official

Канун грозы

The illiterate kaffir Mpele receives a message from the prison farm about his... death, as well as the “property of the deceased”: a pipe, a pen and a notebook... The perplexed Mpele, who has never even been under arrest, turns to the police...

Based on the play of the same name by I. Popov and L. Stepanov, staged by the State Academic Maly Theater of the USSR.

Two village boys - brothers Semyon and Pavel - serve a Moscow merchant-shopkeeper. They face harsh exploitation and hard forced labor. The brothers' life paths diverge. Unable to withstand the merchant's bullying, Pavel goes to the factory, becomes a worker, and later a professional revolutionary. Semyon remains in service. In the post-revolutionary period, Semyon, having been to the front and returning to the village, joined the kulaks, brutally dealt with representatives of the Soviet government, becoming the head of a gang of “badgers” hiding in the forests. A Red Army detachment led by Pavel is sent to fight the bandits...

On a gloomy March 1881, an old, sick man was dying in the Nikolaevsky military land hospital in St. Petersburg. Delirium tremens had done its dirty work: there was no hope for recovery. And this “old man” had just turned 42 years old, and it was the great Russian composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. Who knows what visions, what memories swarmed in his fevered imagination in rare moments of enlightenment?

The hero saw among his colleagues a man whom he had met during the war in the dungeons of the Gestapo. This man reported that a thief from the same cell was trying to escape. The “thief” was shot, and later it turned out that he was the leader of the underground...

Story is set in deep Russia, on a wild river in woods called "Ugrum-reka" - the Moody river. Son of a dishonest trader, Prohor Gromov wants to become his own man. He takes his fathers order and goes trough the woods to deliver the furs to the byer in the nearest town. He tries to take the shorter way and get`s lost. At the highest point of this, his fathers servant, Abdulla, who is sent with him to guard him almost shoots him driven by hunger, but comes to the senses and saves his life by continuing to go on.