In this mid-twenties comedy-melodrama, a young peasant woman named Katka (Veronika Buzhinskaya) arrives in Petrograd in the first days of the New Economic Policy. She has come to find work and to help save money for her family back home, but this goal becomes unobtainable. Down on her luck, she resorts to selling apples in the street, and it is not long before Katka encounters the city’s underworld. Her struggles seem nearly insurmountable until she meets a homeless intellectual, Vadka (Fyodor Nikitin). This is the first of several distinctive collaborations between codirector Fridrikh Ermler and actor Nikitin.