An elderly Moscow professor makes a trip to a small Siberian town where he spent his childhood and youth. On the way, he recalls the events of his own life from childhood to the present and the fate of his relatives and friends. These memories, together with travel impressions, provide a detailed panorama of the life of a Russian person in the outback and in the capital of Russia in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The given facts and biographies of people have a documentary basis