The film adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel "The Teenager". The main character - Arkady Dolgoruky - is the illegitimate son of a noble nobleman. Throughout his childhood, strangers were engaged in his upbringing, his peers often teased him, and he grew impressionable and vulnerable. Being already a twenty-year-old boy, Arkady moves to St. Petersburg and enters to serve as a secretary to the old prince. Here he has an idea - to become as rich as the millionaire Rothschild. He hopes to achieve this goal with the help of his original theory of "perseverance and continuity".