Not by Bread Alone

Late in the Joseph Stalin era, a teacher of physics, Dimitri Lopatkin, invents a machine which revolutionizes the centrifugal casting of pipes, then a difficult and time-consuming operation.

Lopatkin is offered a chance to work on his machine for the military, which he accepts, but he is soon arrested and accused of passing secrets to his lover, Nadia Drozdova, the estranged wife of one of the officials who opposes him.

He finds that Nadia has been able to obtain his papers, that the designers who built the demonstration model have been able to replicate it, and that his machine is in operation in a factory in the Urals.

The officials, who form an invisible web that frustrate the individualists, suggest that he should buy a car, a television, or a dacha, and by implication become like them, but Lopatkin says, no, he will continue to fight them: "Man lives not by bread alone, if he is honest."

Readers viewed Not by Bread Alone as obsolete once more explicit books about the terror, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, were published.

One reader wrote to Solzhenitsyn, "We still have fresh memories of the attacks on V. Dudintsev for his Not by Bread Alone—which, compared to your story, is merely a children's fairy tale.

[7] At a time when intense reaction to a literary work would last not more than a couple of months, Novy Mir received hundreds of letters, the flood continuing as late as 1960.

[9] One schoolteacher from Belarus wrote to the author: At last, literature has begun talking about our painful problems, about something that hurts and has become, unfortunately, a typical phenomenon of our life!

The advertising campaign for the movie coincided with the 2005 State Duma by-elections there, and Govorukhin was a candidate from the governing United Russia party.