4 ideas
Viktor Sluzhkin, a biology graduate teaching geography in 1990s Perm, cannot control his classroom, and his wife is drifting toward his best friend. He takes a group of his most unruly ninth-graders on a multi-day rafting trip down a wild Ural river, where he drinks, oversleeps and lets things slide in ways that repeatedly put the group at risk. When they return to the city, his personal life is still unresolved.
In the classroom a teacher's position gives him formal power, but teenagers obey it only on the surface or openly mock it. Respect follows competence that the group can see under real stakes, not the title that institutions hand out.
Sluzhkin tries never to impose, moralize or cause pain, and he meets conflict with jokes and withdrawal instead of choices. Looking at his kindness as a form of passivity shows its effect: the wife, the friend, the student he loves and he himself are all left to drift. Declining to take any stance is itself a choice, and it hands the outcome to whoever is willing to act.
For educated people stranded in a post-Soviet provincial city with no prospects, constant clowning, wordplay and drinking work as a coping system. They make a stalled life feel bearable and even charming. The same habits keep the person from naming what is wrong, so that endless deflection replaces the effort to change anything. The protagonist is lovable because of this mechanism and stuck because of it.