A young girl known for being "Homeboy" for everybody is dreaming to become more feminine.

The script about loneliness, conformity and the impossibility of creative realization scared the editorial censorship at the studio, and then at Derzhkino. A lot of claims were made against him. The demands for amendments and endless additions and rewrites by the authors lasted for about a year. The original version of the title "Na pokhony!" ("To bow down!") was replaced by "To Dream and to Live". According to Pylyp Ilyenko, the director's eldest son, this name appeared "as a result of censor pressure." Censorship stopped the tape 40 times: at the stage of the literary script, director's, during film tests (the actors were not approved), filming, etc. The film catastrophically fell apart into fragments, into masterfully filmed, but unrelated scenes. The director called the finished version a "dead film".

Vera Kasatkina, in her youth, experienced an emotional trauma: her husband left her and their child. She is 27 years old and has long given up on the idea of personal happiness. When she meets Volodya Chizhov, who is younger than her, she sincerely offers to help him prepare for his university entrance exams. Deep feelings begin to develop between them. Vera's mother is adamantly against this relationship, and Vera's colleagues have already figured it out and are making fun of her. Volodya, an open and persistent young man, tactfully takes the initiative — he helps Vera overcome her fears and find happiness.

1979 film by Leonid Menaker

During WWII a troop train is stuck at a small railway station. A young lieutenant gets close to a local girl, then the war separates them. Twenty years later he happens to arrive at the same station and finds out that she'd waited for him for many years.