When a father and son from the Uzbek steppe move to Moscow in search of the boy's missing mother they are condemned to the lot of the 'gastarbeiter'.

Based on the Russian classic novel. While maintaining all the main plot-lines of the novel, it follows the events not as they happen but as they are reflected in the mind of the dying hero. Thus make a chain of recollections about the life he had lived through, now seen as a series of irrevocable mistakes and interpreted anew: it is either reconsideration or repentance. Recollections make main hero torment himself over his own past pretenses that seem ridicules now agonize and despair over his perfect indifference to everything except himself, see the horrible aspect of killing his friend, a greenhorn and a show-off. The final action of an intelligent and outstanding man is judging oneself without mercy.