On the river Don, deep in Cossack country, in the tiny village of Veshenskaya, lives gentle-mannered Mikhail Sholokhov. There, under the straw which roofs his three-room cottage, Sholokhov watches ...

Based on the novel of the same name by Mikhail Sholokhov, about the fate of people ... the collapse of the foundations and ideals of the Don Cossacks of Russia at the beginning of the XX century ...