The Twelve Chairs

In 1927, Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov is an impoverished aristocrat from Imperial Russia now working as a local village bureaucrat. A dying woman reveals that a fortune in jewels had been hidden from the Bolsheviks by being sewn into the seat cushion of one of the twelve chairs from the family's dining room set. The two men set off together to locate the chairs and recover the fortune, but are stymied by a series of false leads and other trying events. As they progress, they meet comrades from every walk of life in Soviet Russian society.