In a Caucasian city at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Pyotr Petrovich Pepinyants is a familiar presence in a local café. Once accustomed to a more prosperous life, he now struggles to preserve an appearance of importance through grand manners, influential names, and peculiar telephone calls. Behind the comic surface lie themes of poverty, wounded pride, social humiliation, and the fragile dignity of a man unwilling to surrender his former identity.