26-year-old Anton selflessly, with difficulty, supports a large and dysfunctional family: a bankrupt father, a sickly mother, sister, older and younger brothers. From morning till night he is busy with day-to-day literary work - writing short comic stories for cheap magazines. Anton Chekhov, the future great writer, only realizes his own gift in the film. Next to Anton are his older brothers - Nikolai, a talented artist who never wrote his pictorial masterpiece, and Alexander, Anton's closest friend and desperate envious person, a gifted writer who “wasted” his talent.