The Old Man veers between a contemporary effort to buy a dacha and the memories of an incident during the Civil War. A questionable action in the past haunts the present and throws into relief the materialism that has come to replace revolutionary idealism; by suggesting that this idealism may have been tainted in the first place, Trifonov implicitly blames the past for the ills of the present. While the setting and situation are very Soviet, the quandary Trifonov describes has universal significance.