In Yuri Trifonov’s novel “The Old Man,” he completed—spelled out to the end—his yearning for History. A participant in the Civil War, Pavel Yevgrafovich, suddenly receives a letter from his first love, Asya. And then comes the hot, smoky summer of 1972: life at the dacha among a large family and small squabbles fades before the events from fifty years earlier, when the commander of the Red Army, Asya’s husband Sergei Kirillovich Migulin, was unjustly sentenced and executed.