A Piece of Bread

A village man, Gerasim Andreev, comes to Petersburg at the end of the 19th century from the Tver region to earn money and in hopes of finding his daughter. The city greets him with coldness and humiliation: Gerasim is taken for a beggar, suspected of theft, driven away and shoved. But behind the everyday picture of things emerges a broader view of a ruined Russia, where thousands of people went to the capital to “search for bread.”