The story of the Last Bow about the meeting of a soldier who had just returned from the war with his grandmother Katerina Petrovna, who replaced his mother and father, gave the title to the most beloved famous story by readers. All his life, Astafyev dreamed that he had not escaped to his grandmother's funeral. Here the writer, already gray-haired himself, comes in Porridge to the funeral of an old villager. And he hears a whisper behind his back: "She loved him, to the little orphan shanezhka, will she put a gingerbread". With trepidation, love and guilt, the writer bows in the story to all ordinary Russian people who have preserved light and kindness in their souls, despite terrible trials. In gratitude to his fellow villagers, Viktor Petrovich did everything to get up in an Oatmeal near the cemetery where his mother and grandmother lie, a wooden village church. "In the evenings," the writer writes, "a light glows in it remotely, as if the souls of my fellow villagers and relatives gathered together shine from a distant, incomprehensible distance... Life is beautiful and sad, I repeat after one great man. It is about this joy and sadness that I do not stop and will not stop thinking as long as I live, as long as I breathe.