At the center of the play is a rethinking of the confrontation between dudes and ideologically correct party workers: the main character of the work, nicknamed Bams, while studying at the university, was called to account by higher authorities for his passion for the “American way of life,” or, simply put, Western music. His fellow student, Komsomol organizer Ivchenko, did not intervene in the massacre committed against him. Having met many years later, former friends look at long-faded passions from the position of people wise in life. As Viktor Slavkin himself wrote: “At first the play was called “The Dude’s Daughter,” and it was based on a true story. A guy named Bams studied with me at the institute. He was fond of then-forbidden Western jazz, dressed fashionably, and his favorite writer was Hemingway. Once, at a faculty evening, he sang “Chattanooga Chuchu” in English, which was then equated with anti-Soviet propaganda. Remember: “Today he plays jazz, and tomorrow he will sell his homeland.” Bems was miraculously not expelled from the institute, but he was not allowed to move on after graduation. This memory served as the impetus for the play.” One of the main leitmotifs of Slavkin’s work—forgiveness for meanness committed by loved ones, friends, in a word, those with whom most of his life is connected—can be traced here. “Adult Daughter” was written a little earlier than “Serso”, so in Bems there is still intolerance towards Ivchenko, with whose silent assistance he became an “engineer without permission” for the rest of his life (“I then tried all my life, but for some reason in my life I was so and were not allowed"), while the main character of “Serso” Cockerel is, by human standards, already completely enlightened, and does not react in any way to how his enterprising friend Pasha is shamelessly trying to appropriate the house that belongs to him literally before his eyes. According to the late Slavkin, if you cut off the ends, then together with the people who betrayed you, you also cut off pieces of your life, including all the good things that were connected with them. The philosophical message is that a mean person is in himself only an instrument of fate, and everything that happens would have happened anyway, and someone’s meanness only catalyzes future failures. In general, everything that happens to a person is his own fault. As they say, you can’t escape fate. It’s interesting that these roles of “life victims”, blissful losers in Anatoly Vasilyev’s plays “The Adult Daughter of a Young Man” and “Serso” were played by the same actor - Albert Filozov, thus becoming a theatrical alter ego of the author and who embodied the theme of the evolution of kindness in an individual personality.