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Fedor Ozep, the director of the Russian classic The Queen of Spades, used the occasion of his directing this 1928 German co-production of yet another Tolstoy tale as his means to escape from the Soviet system. In the movie, Fedya Protassov (Vsevolod Pudovkin) is doing everything in his power to free his unhappy wife (Mariya Yakobini) from the bondage of marriage so that she can remarry and finally achieve some measure of happiness in life. Unfortunately, the powerful Russian Orthodox church works hard to make any such arrangement impossible, and in the end the only means by which he can bring this about is to commit suicide. The prints and original musical score to this film were restored and shown once more in 1990.