Film covers the events in Ukraine from 1912 through the Russian revolution and the fall of the Russian Empire. Focused on the life of the family of the Ukrainian modernist writer Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky (1864-1913). Film starts in 1912 in the South of the Russian Empire, in the Ukrainian city of Chernigov, where the renown Ukrainian writer Kotsyubinsky lives with his family. He and his family are the revolutionary democrats. The Kotsyubisky family is active in the Russian revolution, which spreads into Ukraine and ends with the uprising against the Central Rada in Kiev.