19-year-old Muscovite Gera was sent by his parents to hide from the army in a remote village to the teetotal peasant Panyukov, and for some reason these completely different people turn out to be not strangers to each other. Both are endowed with the gift of sensitivity and sincerity, and both are completely superfluous in the world that they are surrounds.
1. Get to know each other. 19-year-old Muscovite Gera was sent by his parents to hide from the army in a remote village to the non-drinking peasant Panyukov, and for some reason these completely different people turn out to be not strangers to each other. But this is not revealed to him, but to the reader — gradually, in the delicate dotted line of precise scenes. Here Gera makes compresses for Panyukov’s sore legs, and he carefully installs a socket for a computer in the house. Here Panyukov hides his favorite book, “Childhood of Bagrov the Grandson,” because Hera “has not grown up,” but he finds it and cannot tear himself away. And now together they are looking for a missing cow in the forest and walking along a country road together, shrouded in fog and loneliness … Both are endowed with the gift of sensitivity and sincerity, and both are completely superfluous in the world that surrounds them.
2. Find your place. It seems to everyone that somewhere there is another world and salvation is there. Hera, locked in the village, rushes with all his being to the city — there is a girl Tatyana, there is dad and mom, there is a rumble and vanity, there is life. Yes, and Panyukov, having never been in the city, suddenly believes that there he will cure his sore legs, find a doctor for the woman he loves, and life will finally acquire meaning. But are we destined to break out of the limits of our “I”, our destiny? To begin with, it is important not to miss this fate.
3. Don’t be late for a meeting. But this is exactly what happens when relatives still allow life to pull them apart in different directions. Thus, in the end, the peasant and the teenager passed each other, and Panyukov did not have time to go to his beloved, who had waited in vain for him all his life … Andrey Dmitriev wrote a sad novel about the disunity of people close to each other. After reading it, I want to ask myself if we are waiting for a date that has already come or, on the contrary, will never come.
Time, 318 s.