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Sisin, a forty-year-old writer, gets on the train and goes out of town. In the car, he is surrounded by strange passengers, some of whom resemble famous Russian writers: Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kuprin... Surreal visions, hidden desires, fears, and anxieties arise in Sisin's imagination. Love, career, and life itself seem stupid and meaningless to him.
Status
Released
Original Language
RU

As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.

On the eve of his fortieth anniversary Sergei Makarov looks back at his life and learns that he has achieved nothing. He was not able to be happy and to bring happiness to the closest people in his life, neither to his long-suffering wife nor young mistress nor friends nor work... It is about the men who never grew up and could not find themselves in the time of stagnation – gifted, charming, but infantile and lost, they never were able to realize themselves...