Description:

A Cossack folk tale about how gossip ruined a kingdom.

Created in the spirit of German Expressionism. Wordless except for three traditional folk songs of the Nekrasov Cossacks at the beginning, middle and end of the film.

The source material comes from two Nekrasov Cossack folk tales:
"The Stupid Magpie" (Глупая сорока) and "How a Cossack Watched Mermaids" (Как казак русалок смотрел). The first of these can be found in F.V. Tumelevich, 1961, p.47. It tells of a magpie owned by the Tsar's wife who would repeat anything that she heard. When the Tsar's wife began having an affair with a fisherman, an old servant woman who didn't like the wife told the Tsar about it, and the Tsar decided to execute his wife. The magpie heard of this and told the Tsar's wife, who called up the old servant and accused her of having an affair with the fisherman. The magpie then flew over to the Tsar and told him that she'd heard it was the old servant woman who had an affair with the fisherman, not his wife. The Tsar decided to pardon his wife and execute the old servant woman instead. The Tsar's other servants (who didn't like his wife) heard about this, and decided to catch the magpie, sew her mouth shut, and poison the Tsar's wife in revenge. The magpie flew over to warn the Tsar's wife, but because her mouth was sewn shut, the Tsar's wife did not understand her in time to save herself from the poison. The magpie then flew to a chicken barn, where the chickens pecked out the thread, then flew over to the Tsar, told him what his servants had done, and added that they were going to murder him as well. The Tsar had all of his servants hanged, and began living alone with the magpie. With no servants, they eventually fell into poverty. One day the Tsar got mad at the magpie and told her that it was all her fault, to which she replied "if you'd had any brains, Tsar, you wouldn't have listened to what your servants said." The Tsar hit her with a stick in anger, and the magpie died.