The novella's original title was "Случай на станции Кочетовка" (An Incident at Kochetovka Station) – this is the authentic name of a small railway town in the general area implied by hints in the course of the story – but a change was forced upon Solzhenitsyn by the Novyi Mir editorial board due to its allegorical association with the name of Vsevolod Kochetov, then editor-in-chief of the conservative Soviet literary magazine Oktiabr' (October).

[2] The action of the novella takes place only over three or four hours,[3] a night in late October 1941, and is written mostly from the viewpoint (though not from inside the mind) of a somewhat short-sighted character called Lieutenant Vasili Zotov, who is the second in command of the station.

[2] The brief incident described involves a soldier and actor, Tveritinov, who has lost contact with his military unit and has spent several days trying to catch up, riding on board freight cars without a ticket or identification papers.

Weeks later, Zotov twice asks about the actor only to be told that he "has been taken care of" and "we never make mistakes" – leaving the reader to guess Tveritinov's fate.

[6] In 1970 a TV film was shot in Sweden (titled Ett möte på Kretjetovkastationen);[citation needed] the script was written by Solzhenitsyn, with Christian Berling playing Zotov and Ulf Johanson as Tveritinov.