Whose fault

Vera and Stansky loved each other. Faced two forces, two passionate and gifted natures. He is an innovative pedagogue, fanatically devoted to his idea; she is a born artist with a beautiful voice. He is looking for places in the province where there are no people. She tends to the stage. But Stansky dictates his conditions to Vera: family or stage. The choice must be made consciously and irrevocably - and here too. He despises art, far from the masses, accessible only to a handful of well-fed and idle people. Defeated by its strasiness, Vera renounces her vocation, abandons the conservatory and marries Stansky.

Three years have passed. Stanski has a daughter, Manya. But love for the child and husband cannot satisfy the rebellious soul of the Faith. With irresistible power woke up and beckon her bright dreams about the stage again. Secretly from her husband, Vera is making a debut in Moscow. But the beautiful voice cannot atone for the absence of school and inexperience of the debutante. Having survived the first minutes of despair, with pride inherent in strong souls, Vera decides to milk her place in the world with hard work and leaves her mother's home abroad for work and struggle. On the eve of departure, bursting into tears, she writes to her husband, asking her to forgive her deception and not to deny her. Shocked by this betrayal of duty, Stansky replies to Belief that he strikes her out of his life and soul. In pursuit of glory, she broke his heart, killed in him faith in a woman. But there is another crime that he cannot forgive: she left her child. He does not want to poison his daughter with a tale of betrayal and betrayal. And when Manya asked him: “Where is my mother?” He answered her: “Your mother died.”

It takes six years. Enduring cruel deprivation and loneliness, Vera finishes her teaching and gets a debut in Paris. Over the years she sent her husband a few letters asking for forgiveness. But all the traces of Stan, who left the county town, were lost. Faith is given to a person who has loved her for many years. Meanwhile, Stansky was the first to break with the past. He met with a young girl, but he still loves his Manya, a fragile and painful girl, with extremely passionate love. And now five more years have passed. Mane is already the thirteenth year, she studies in a gymnasium. Life is not easy for this talented, impressionable girl, with a sophisticated and nervous organization and also suffered from chronic heart disease. Jealous Manya does not love his stepmother, and seeing the caress lavished on little Kolya passionately longs for his dead mother. She is unhappy.

And suddenly, due to a number of accidents, there is some kind of fatal riddle in the past of her father in front of Manya. For some reason, everyone thinks her mother is alive. Full of horror, she asks her father this question, and the hope that the mother is alive, beats in her big heart. “Your mother died, pray for her,” says Stansky, shocked by the necessity of lying, but seeing no other way out. At this time, the Bolshoi Theater is touring the Parisian singer Lola. By chance, for the sake of Mani, once in the theater, Stansky in the famous Lola recognizes his wife, Vera. That same night, frightened by his heart attack, Sophie begs him to get married with her in order to give his name to the children. His wife must have died. "She is alive, Sonya, she is alive," - this cry of Stan’s is heard by Manya, who has woken up. And from that moment on, the drama of the childish soul deepens.

Vera, who also recognized her husband in the theater, gets his address and sees his family atmosphere from the street through the windows, Sophie and Kohl. There is only Mani. Where is she? At this moment, Manya, returning from the gymnasium, notices a woman in black by the window. The actress is hiding, not realizing for the first moment, that next to her was her Manya, mourned by her over the years with such burning tears. Jealousy has dazzled her. And horror settles in the girl's soul. Who is this woman whose face she could not see? She gets sick the same night, but is overwhelmed. Lola at a party in the same house recognizes her daughter in Mans and meets her husband.

Along with the film “Andrei Toboltsev”, staged by Andreev a year earlier on another Verbitskaya novel, the film “Whose fault?” Was noted by B. Likhachev as “undoubtedly successful” ^[1] .

• B. S. Likhachev. Materials to the history of cinema in Russia (1914-1916). - M. , 1960.
• V. Short. Directed by and operators of Russian feature films (1896-1921). M., 2009.