Shukshin's acting debut in The Two Feodors had made him a popular box office hit and though he graduated from the State Institute of Cinematography in 1961, he continued to accept parts. His many youthful occupations-student, construction worker, truckdriver and military man-gave him an oddly variegated pool of experience to draw on, so many of his roles evoked what Ian Christie has called Shukshin's "emphatic ordinariness." Barnet's Alyenka casts Shukshin as a tractor driver whose city-bred wife despises the vulgarity of the Kazakhstan steppes. It is the mid-fifties and city-dwellers are flocking to the "virgin lands" to become officially sanctioned pioneers. Nine-year-old Alyenka is searching for her father amid the truck convoys heading East. On her journey, she meets an eccentric array of characters who divulge their bittersweet stories to her. There is a dentist from Riga out to prove to her family that she can "rough it" in the new territories, a woman whose daughter has died on the steppes and who now refuses to raise any more children there, and, of course, the tractor driver (Shukshin), saddled with a wife who yearns for a culture only to be found in Moscow. Unlike other Soviet films which mythify the deeds of the pioneers, Alyenka overlooks the political agenda focusing instead on the pioneers themselves, who are revealed to be opulent of feeling and possessed by grave preoccupations with the future. Completed two years before Shukshin's first feature, Alyenka seems to anticipate themes that he would soon make his own.