Gennady Mamlin’s "Journey to the South," a summary Automatic translate

Playwright Gennady Mamlin’s book brings together plays written between 1966 and 1982. The texts explore people’s moral development, moral choices, and the clash of different life positions. The characters find themselves in unconventional situations that require self-honesty.

The play "Hey, You, Hello!" gained immense popularity. Theaters performed it hundreds of times. In 1970, Antonina Zinovieva made a television film of the same name based on it. Other texts from the collection were also widely performed by youth theaters.

Hey you, hello.

Fifteen-year-old Valery Dorokhov lives in a seaside town. An elderly magician, Semyon Semyonovich Leshchinsky, is temporarily staying in his yard. Valery allows guests to stay for free. Masha, a girl the same age as him, watches him through a hole in the fence. She has come from the village to live with her stern grandmother, Taisiya. Masha sells flowers at the market, saves up her pennies, and acts decidedly mature.

Valery finds the girl too materialistic. He himself is a complete idealist. He hides his father’s illness. The man is in the hospital after a serious injury. The teenagers often quarrel. Valery, in a fit of anger, calls his neighbor a snake. Masha ignores the rudeness, genuinely seeking companionship. The boy pushes the girl into the sea when she eats his movie tickets out of spite.

Masha soon learns an unpleasant secret. Valery’s cousin Goliath is secretly charging rent to the tenants. Valery is furious. He packs up his cousin’s things and throws him out of the yard. Meanwhile, the hospital announces his father’s upcoming major surgery. Valery falls into despair. He goes into the mountains and gets drunk on wine. Masha finds him, calms him down, and brings him back to his senses. A genuine attraction develops between the teenagers. Masha leaves for home after a fight with her grandmother. The teenagers say goodbye, promising to meet again.

Antonina

The action takes place in the Siberian taiga in spring. Sixteen-year-old Tonya is waiting for forester Fyodor Kuzmich in his hut. A limping archaeologist, Stepan Barmin, enters the house. He’s fifty years old. His student, Alexei, has fallen off a cliff in the mountains. Barmin urgently needs to get to a phone and call a helicopter. The river is covered in melting ice.

Barmin risks his life by walking across the ice. He falls into the water. Tonya pulls him out with a long pole. During a conversation in the house, the truth comes out. Barmin is Tonya’s biological father. He fell in love with another woman and left the family thirteen years ago. Tonya openly expresses her hatred for her father.

That night, Tonya secretly goes through the forest to the military. She passes on the coordinates of the injured student. In the morning, Sofia Petrovna, Tonya’s mother, arrives at the hut on a passing helicopter. The meeting between the former spouses is extremely frosty. Sofia Petrovna displays wounded pride and rejects Barmin’s attempts at reconciliation. Tonya recognizes this stubbornness. The girl sharply condemns her mother for her selfishness. The daughter forgives her father. In the end, Tonya fires a shotgun through the open window, celebrating the new found family.

Let’s talk about the strangeness of love

The first part of the play depicts a stuck outdoor elevator. Sasha Tantalov has arrived in Moscow. He’s stuck in the cabin. It turns out that the mechanism was deliberately sabotaged by Muscovite Tanya. That summer, Tanya was visiting Sasha’s relatives in a Siberian village. There, the teenagers had a heated argument over jealousy over a local woman named Lena. Tanya wants to force Sasha to confess his love. She mockingly passes him sandwiches through the bars.

Sasha breaks some important news. He’s been accepted to college and transferred to the correspondence course. He’s leaving to build the Baikal-Amur Mainline. He invites Tanya to come with him. At first, she flatly refuses, calling Sasha crazy. Then she abruptly changes her mind and agrees to go to the taiga.

The second part takes the viewer to a summer café. Waiter Tolya Agafonov is chatting with the beautiful Nadya. Tolya is a talented musician and poet. He took a job as a waiter to give his grandfather Faddeich a rest. Nadya refuses to accept his actions. She offers Tolya a savings account with two thousand rubles. She asks him to drop the tray and focus on his career. Tolya flatly refuses to betray his principles. Nadya leaves for the promising diplomat Alik Shmakov. Tanya appears, kisses Tolya, and supports his honest choice.

Journey to the South

Seventeen-year-old Misha Strunnikov steals his father’s green car. The young man accidentally discovers a bitter truth: his father is leaving him for another woman. At a gas station, Misha picks up nineteen-year-old auto mechanic Roman Meshkov and twenty-seven-year-old Natalya Pavlovna. Later, a village girl, Alena, joins them.

The group is traveling south. One night on the highway, Misha hits a wild boar. In the darkness, he believes he’s killed a man. He panics. Natalya Pavlovna immediately takes the blame. Misha soon learns a shocking detail: Natalya Pavlovna is the very woman who broke up his family. She followed him to protect him from harm.

The woman invites Misha to a frank conversation. She persuades the young man to abandon his blind maximalism. Natalya Pavlovna buys him a plane ticket. Misha flies to Moscow to take the chemistry entrance exam. Roman stays with Alena. The cynical city boy develops a deep respect for the straightforwardness of the country girl.

Salute to the dinosaurs

Seventy-year-old Anna Andreyevna comes to visit sixteen-year-old Muscovite Vasya. The woman considers herself the sister of the boy’s late grandmother. Vasya plays percussion instruments in a youth band. Rehearsals take place right in their apartment. The old woman is trying to get their life together and raise the teenager. She schedules rehearsals so as not to disturb the neighbors with noise.

Vasya learns the truth from his parents. The information desk gave Anna Andreyevna the wrong address. She ended up visiting complete strangers. Vasya decides to hide the mistake. The young man sincerely feels sorry for the lonely woman.

Anna Andreyevna buys Vasya expensive jeans and a real piano. Vasya quarrels with his mercenary friend Korzhikov, who was secretly selling tickets to their free concert. The old woman accidentally discovers her real sister in Izmailovo. This relative turns out to be a greedy, evil merchant. Anna Andreyevna flees in horror. Vasya continues to care for his adopted grandmother, preserving her bright illusions. He secretly sends her letter to her friend Olya on the Yenisei River.

Bells

Thirty-five-year-old Vera Petrovna meets film director Sergei Khmarov. The forty-year-old director is rude, cynical, and self-assured. He discovers the woman’s long-held secret. Vera Petrovna was a former ballet soloist. After a car accident, she left the stage for good. She was saved by surgeon Ivan Semenovich, who became her husband.

Khmarov forces Vera Petrovna to star in his new film. She plays a professor’s assistant. She demonstrates outstanding dramatic talent. During filming, Khmarov fakes a heart attack to draw out the actress’s despair. The director falls in love with Vera Petrovna and proposes marriage.

Vera Petrovna refuses Khmarov. She learns of her fatal diagnosis. The actress carefully conceals her illness from everyone to finish the arduous filming. The film wins the top prize at an international festival. Vera Petrovna dies. Khmarov is left alone, shocked by the self-sacrifice of the woman he loves. In the final scene, he conducts a mental dialogue with her spirit to the sounds of a toy ballerina.