In 1918, Vladimir brings his beloved Olga a bouquet of asters. At this time, loved ones are given mainly flour and millet, and bags, like corpses, lie under the beds of Karelian birch. Tinting her lips with a golden Guerlain pencil, Olga asks her boyfriend if it could happen that in Moscow it would be impossible to get French lip color. She wonders: how then to live?
Confectionery shops are ruining in Stoleshnikov Lane, signboards from “bourgeois” shops are tearing off Kuznetsky Most: they will now receive shag on their cards. Olga's parents emigrated, advising her daughter to marry a Bolshevik in order to save an apartment. Olga is surprised at the oddities of the revolution: instead of putting a guillotine on the Place of Forehead, the Bolsheviks banned the sale of ice cream ... She earns money for her life by selling her jewelry.
Olga's brother, Gog's nineteen-year-old sweet youth, is leaving for the Don, in the White Army. He loves his homeland and is happy to give his life for it. Olga explains Gogino's behavior by the fact that he did not finish school.
Vladimir once came to Moscow from Penza. Now, in the revolution, he lives by selling rare books from his library. His older brother Sergey is a Bolshevik.He manages water transport (as an archaeologist) and lives in the Metropol. He dines with two potatoes fried in the imagination of the cook. Vladimir tells his brother that happy love is more important than a socialist revolution.
Having come to Olga, Vladimir finds her lying on the sofa. To his alarmed questions about well-being and the offer to read the Satyricon aloud to her, Petronia Olga replies that she had constipation and asks to give her a klystir. Vladimir no longer asks himself if he loves Olga: he understands that the love that the rubber gut did not suffocate from an enema is immortal. At night he cries with love.
Revolutionary life goes on. In Vologda, the meeting of communists ruled that it was necessary to destroy the class of the bourgeoisie and thus rid the world of parasites. Vladimir makes an offer to Olga, and she accepts it, explaining that the two of them will be warmer to sleep in the winter. Vladimir moves to Olga, leaving the furniture in his former apartment: the house committee forbids him to take a bed with him, because according to the laws of the revolution, husband and wife must sleep in the same bed. On the first night, Olga tells him that she married him by calculation, but it turned out - by love. At night, Vladimir wanders along the street, losing sleep from happiness and from love for Olga. He is ready to ring the bells so that the whole city knows about such a great event as his love.
Olga declares that she wants to work for the Soviet government. Vladimir brings her to his brother Sergey. Since it turns out that Olga is not able to do anything, Sergey arranges her for a responsible position.Olga forms propaganda trains, her personal secretary comrade Mamashev appears. Sergei often comes to Vladimir and Olga: he drinks tea, considers photos of the white guard Gogi. Brother Sergey, with his blue kind eyes, seems to Vladimir mysterious, like a dark bottle of wine.
Once, having come from work, Olga casually informs her husband that she cheated on him. It seems to Vladimir that his throat has become a narrow, broken straw. However, he calmly asks his wife to take a bath.
Vladimir wants to jump out of the seventh floor. But, looking down, he notices that he will fall on a pile of garbage. He becomes disgusted, and he abandons his intention. He inherited squeamishness from the old-handed grandmother. Olga's lover is the brother of Vladimir Sergey. Often she goes to him from the service, warning her husband that she is spending the night at Metropol. Out of grief, Vladimir drinks, then converges with his servant Marfusha.
Sergey gives Vladimir a note to Lunacharsky, according to which he is taken back to private assistant professors. Sergei himself, in his own salon car, leaves the former royal train for the front. Olga and Vladimir buy him warm socks on Sukharevka. Famine is rampant in Russia, cases of cannibalism are becoming more frequent in villages. In Moscow, NEP. From a letter from Sergei, Olga learns that he shot her brother Gogu. Soon, Sergey returns from the front due to shell shock.
Olga makes herself a new lover - the rich NEPman Ilya Petrovich Dokuchaev, a former peasant in the village of Tyrkovka. It seems interesting to her to surrender to him for fifteen thousand dollars, which, however, she relates to the committee for helping the hungry. In 1917, Dokuchaev speculated on products, diamonds, manufactory, drugs.Now he is a tenant in a textile factory, a supplier of the Red Army, a stockbroker, and the owner of several luxury stores in Moscow. Ilya Petrovich “is rather interested in hunger” as an unusual commercial prospect. His constantly pregnant wife lives in the village. When she arrives, Dokuchaev beats her.
Having become Dokuchaev’s mistress, Olga leads a luxurious life. She spends the money that Dokuchaev gives her without putting off for a rainy day. Vladimir remains her husband, and Sergey - her lover. Once Dokuchaev brags to Vladimir about a successful trade fraud. Vladimir tells Sergei about this, he says "where to." Dokuchaev is arrested. After hearing the news of his arrest, Olga continues to feast on her favorite drunken cherry sweets donated by Dokuchaev.
Sergei expelled from the party. Olga does not want to see him. She does not read Dokuchaev’s letters from the camp. At night, she silently lies on the couch and smokes. A friend and colleague of Vladimir, who accidentally came to visit, said: “You call everything in your own words ... inside out ... and any other size out there ... look, you will show your bare asses - and it’s a chill!” And sadness ... ”Olga tells Vladimir that she is conceited and that she wants to believe in at least something. Looking at Olga's empty and sad eyes, Vladimir recalls the story of a mother bandit. When asked what he was sitting for, he answered: for having misunderstood the revolution. Vladimir understands that his love for Olga is worse than madness. He begins to think about the death of Olga and is frightened of his thoughts.
Once Olga calls Vladimir at the university where he works, and reports that he shoots in five minutes. Pissed off, he wishes her a happy journey, and a minute later he rushes off in a cab across Moscow, begging time to stop and blaming himself for having ruined love by trickery. Running into the apartment, Vladimir finds Olga in bed. She eats sweets, next to the browning is a box of "drunken cherries." Olga smiles, Vladimir sighs with relief, but then he sees that the bed is saturated with blood. The bullet stuck in Olga's spine. The operation is done without chloroform. The last words of Olga that Vladimir hears: “It’s just a little disgusting for me to lie with unintended lips ...”
Olga died, and on the ground as if nothing had happened.
