A gypsy camp roams the steppes of Bessarabia. At the campfire, a gypsy family prepares dinner, horses graze nearby, and a tame bear lies behind the tent. Gradually, everything becomes silent and falls into a dream. Only in one tent does the old man awake, waiting for his daughter Zemfira, who has gone for a walk in the field. And then Zemfira appears along with a young man unfamiliar to the old man. Zemfira explains that she met him behind the barrow and invited him to the camp that he was being prosecuted by the law and that he wanted to be a gypsy. His name is Aleko. The old man cordially invites the young man to stay as long as he wants, and says that he is ready to share bread and shelter with him.

In the morning, the old man wakes Zemfira and Aleko, the camp wakes up and sets off on a picturesque crowd. The heart of a young man is contracting with longing at the sight of an empty plain. But what is he yearning for? Zemfira wants to know this. A conversation ensues between them. Zemfira fears that he regrets the life he has left, but Aleko reassures her and says that without regret he left "the captivity of stuffy cities." In the life that he abandoned, there is no love, which means there is no fun, and now his desire is to always be with Zemfira. The old man, hearing their conversation, tells them an old tradition about the poet, who was once exiled by the king to these parts and languished in his heartland, despite the love and care of the locals. Aleko recognizes in the hero of this legend Ovid and is amazed at the vicissitudes of fate and the ephemerality of glory.

Aleko roams for two years with the camp, free, like the gypsies themselves, not regretting the abandoned. He drives bear villages and earns his bread. Nothing confuses the peace of his soul, but one day he hears Zemfira singing a song that leads him into confusion. In this song, Zemfira admits that she has fallen out of love with him. Aleko asks her to stop singing, but Zemfira continues, and then Aleko realizes that Zemfira is unfaithful to him. Zemfira confirms Aleko's most terrible assumptions.

At night, Zemfira wakes up her father and says that Aleko weeps and groans in a dream, calls her, but his love has sent Zemfira, her heart asks for her will. Aleko wakes up, and Zemfira goes to him. Aleko wants to know where Zemfira was. She replies that she was sitting with her father because she could not bear the kind of mental torment Aleko that he experienced in a dream. Aleko admits that he saw Zemfira's betrayal in a dream, but Zemfira persuades him not to believe crafty dreams.

The old gypsy asks Aleko not to be sad and insists that longing will destroy him. Aleko admits that the reason for his sadness is Zemfira's indifference to him. The old man consoles Aleko, says that Zemfira is a child, that a woman’s heart loves jokingly, that no one is free to order a woman’s heart to love one, how to order the moon to freeze. But Aleko, recalling the hours of love spent with Zemfira, is inconsolable. He laments that "Zemfira has cooled," that "Zemfira is unfaithful." As a warning, the old man tells Aleko about himself, about how young he was, how he loved the beautiful Mariula, and how he finally achieved reciprocity. But youth quickly passed, even faster - Mariula’s love. Once she left with another camp, leaving her little daughter, this same Zemfira. And since then, “all the virgins of the world” have dishonored the old man. Aleko asks how the old man could not take revenge on the offenders, how he could not stick the dagger into the heart of the kidnapper and unfaithful wife. The old man replies that nothing can hold love, nothing can be returned, "what happened, will not be again." Aleko assures the old man that he himself is not like that, he cannot give up his rights or even enjoy revenge.

Meanwhile, Zemfira is on a date with a young gypsy. They agree on a new date tonight after the moon sets.

Aleko sleeps anxiously and, waking up, does not find Zemfira nearby. He gets up, leaves the tent, suspicion and fear envelops him, he wanders around the tent and sees a trace barely noticeable in the starlight leading to the mounds, and Aleko sets off on this track. Suddenly he sees two shadows and hears the voices of two lovers who cannot part with each other. He recognizes Zemfira, who asks her lover to escape, but Aleko sticks a knife into him ... In horror, Zemfira says that he despises Aleko's threats and curses him. Aleko kills her too.

Dawn found Aleko sitting on a hill with a bloody knife in his hand. Before him are two corpses. Fellow tribesmen say goodbye to the dead and dig graves for them. An old gypsy sits in thought. After the bodies of the lovers were interred, he comes to Aleko and says: “Leave us, proud man!” He says that the gypsies do not want to live next to the killer, with a man who "only for himself" wants to be free.

The old man said this, and the camp soon took off and disappeared into the steppe. Only one cart remained in the fateful field. Night fell, but no one laid fire before her and no one spent the night under her roof.