Although Sokurov managed to produce this impressive feature film in his graduating year at VGIK, he was told that the film was not acceptable as a diploma work. (His instructors were expecting a twenty-minute biography of the writer Andrei Platonov, and instead got a feature film based on motifs in his works.) It was suppressed as being "in the spirit of pre-revolutionary philosophy," and Sokurov was relegated to documentary filmmaking (also suppressed) for seven years. He guarded the negative for The Lonely Voice of Man and the film was released theatrically nine years later. Set in the 1920s, it tells of the doomed relationship between a young civil-war veteran and the woman who attempts to save him from madness. Archival footage of post-revolutionary Russia is woven into the narrative. Sokurov describes The Lonely Voice of Man, which is dedicated to Tarkovsky: "The film is, it seems to me, deeply traditional within a Russian understanding and world-view: it offers feelings and emotions but not literal action. I tried to show a busy, contemporary individual in the contemplation of subtle, unhurried feelings. I considered the love-erotic motif through the prism of the young man's high spiritual pretension-the splendid impossibility of obscuring the lonely voice of the spirit in the face of nature...It could be qualified as 'supra-earthly,' in the Dante-esque sense."