Stephen Fry narrates this profile of six contemporary Russian writers working in the shadow of the country's great 19th-century literary tradition and under the political pressures of the Putin era. The film moves between interviews and readings with authors including Dmitry Bykov and Vladimir Sorokin, tracing how each one squares the legacy of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy with the business of writing fiction in a country where literature has always carried political weight. Fry, a self-declared Russophile, frames the writers' answers with his own enthusiasm for the language and its history, but the film's real interest is contemporary: censorship, nationalism, and the market for serious fiction in modern Russia. Footage of Moscow streets and writers' apartments grounds the conversations in a specific place and moment rather than treating Russian literature as a museum piece. The result is less a survey of the classics than a snapshot of what it takes to keep writing them today.