It’s 1936 in Leningrad, USSR. Sofia Petrovna is a middle-aged widow who lives with her teenaged son, Kolya, in a communal apartment. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, Sofia and her husband, a respected doctor, enjoyed a bourgeois lifestyle. After the Revolution the state requisitioned all but one room of their apartment; as with other bourgeois households, their apartment was divided to accommodate additional families.

Following her husband’s death, Sofia learns typing to support herself and her beloved son. She finds a job at a major publishing house, where she’s quickly promoted to senior typist. Sofia loves the bustle of the office and takes pride in reviewing manuscripts of patriotic Soviet fiction. She cares about her professional appearance—curling her gray hair and wearing simple but elegant clothes.

The junior typists at the publishing house resent Sofia’s strictness. Sofia is polite to the typists who are good at their jobs and disdainful of those who aren’t. In particular, Sofia disdains an insolent typist named Erna Semyonovna, who is barely literate, makes a lot of mistakes, and shirks work. Erna reminds Sofia of a flirtatious housemaid she and her husband had before the Revolution.

Sofia is respected by her superiors, including the director of the publishing house, Zakharov—a former laborer who rose through the ranks of the Soviet Party system.