The young biologist Viktor Sluzhkin works as a geography teacher in an ordinary school in Perm for need of money. He struggles at first, then makes friends with the pupils, clashes with the head of studies, and takes the finalists on a trip along the river. He also drinks wine with his friends, and tries to get along with his wife, and takes his daughter to the kindergarten. He simply lives... But Alexei Ivanov wrote this simple private story so desperately and so gently, with the resonant phrase “the geographer has drunk away the globe”, as happens only with remarkable books when they become a story about everyone: everyone who at least once got muddled and lost in his life; everyone who sometimes felt as lonely as Viktor Sluzhkin; and everyone who – despite loneliness and melancholy – never lost the ability to feel and to love.