Anna loses her son and husband to war. Her grief-stricken life undergoes a sudden change when three children, tasked with helping the elderly in the city, begin visiting her.

Nikolai Kurkov, a Muscovite, worked at a research institute and dreamed of defending his thesis on agrobiology, but when he arrived in one of the villages of the Non-Chernozem region, he met a childhood friend and stayed, heading a lagging collective farm...

Based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's Nightingale and The Emperor's New Clothes.