 A long episode that featured many popular poets of the time was filmed with the support of Yekaterina Furtseva who suggested to make it a two-part feature and raised the film's budget.Finished by the end of 1962, it was screened in the Moscow Kremlin in March 1963 to a grand scandal.Nikita Khrushchev compared the movie to ideological diversion, criticized it for «ideas and norms of public and private life that are entirely unacceptable and alien to Soviet people» and for showing young people «wandering around the city doing nothing».