Sergei Dovlatov: The Russian writer a New York street is named after

Sergei Dovlatov Way appeared in Queens County, New York, in 2014. It was on this street that the Russian writer had lived for 10 years.

Sergei Dovlatov’s road to fame was not easy. Unlike his friend poet Joseph Brodsky, who was effectively forced out of the USSR, Dovlatov left of his own free will in 1979. In the Soviet Union, he simply wasn't published for ideological reasons and it was becoming increasingly difficult to make a living.

But, unlike many emigrants, Dovlatov knew English well and loved American jazz and literature: Hemingway, Vonnegut, Faulkner, etc. He didn't have to work as a taxi driver or a laundry worker, as many others did. In the U.S., he already had friends and the émigré Russian-language press and he immediately became the editor-in-chief of the Russian-language newspaper ‘The New American’. Moreover, his wife and daughter had left earlier and had settled quite well in New York, which became one of the main reasons for his emigration.

He also had friends among local publishers – Carl and Ellendea Proffer, owners of ‘Ardis Publishing’, who published most of the dissident Russian authors banned by Soviet censorship. It was they who printed most of Dovlatov's books in the 1980s, while, back in his homeland, they began to be published only in the 1990s.

The wanderings of a Soviet intellectual

Sergei Dovlatov was born in 1941 in Ufa, where his parents had been evacuated from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during World War II. In 1944, the family returned.

Dovlatov was always close to Leningrad poets and moved in literary circles. He studied as a philology student (but was expelled), then as a journalism student. But, fate and the need to earn a living threw up various adventures. And all of them turned into his works.

• He served his compulsory military service in camp guard duty. And this is how the book ‘The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard's Story’ was born, one of the strongest and most impressive works in his legacy.
• For several years, Dovlatov lived in Soviet Estonia and worked as a correspondent for local newspapers (and also unexpectedly as a stoker). He described this experience in the tragicomic collection of stories ‘The Compromise’.
• And his work as a tour guide at the Pushkin Museum-Reserve was reflected in the ‘Pushkin Hills’ novel.
• Then, in the collection of stories ‘The Suitcase’, the author literally packs a suitcase for North America, taking only the bare minimum of necessary items. And, for each of them, he has a story.

The main theme of all Dovlatov's works is the tragicomic life of a Soviet person, who had to wriggle within a totalitarian system. Laughter through tears is the main secret behind the popularity of his stories. Many instantly recognized themselves in these sketches, whether it was illegally hunting for fashionable jeans or carrying out senseless assignments from the party leadership.

Big things are seen from a distance

Many famous and even great Russian writers worked abroad: Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Maxim Gorky and Joseph Brodsky to name a few. There was even a joke that “the homeland was better seen from afar”. Dovlatov joined these ranks. Moreover, he became a famous writer precisely in emigration. And he became the first Russian writer after Vladimir Nabokov whose stories were published by the prestigious ‘The New Yorker’ magazine.

Dovlatov wrote only in Russian, but worked closely with good translators. And translating him was not easy. A master of the short form, he had a superb command of language and created unique images and dialogues, conveying characters' personalities through their speech, which revealed social status, education and background.

One of his best books, ‘Pushkin Hills’, was attempted by several translators, but, in the end, it was his daughter Catherine who managed to do it.

Nostalgia as a way of life

Despite all his success, Dovlatov's soul was full of longing. For Leningrad, where he knew every corner, for his poetic circle, for his old life.

“There has been much supposition and speculation as to the ‘tragedy’ of my father’s life, being away from his homeland, the nostalgia… Nostalgia is a feeling common to most people. And it’s not about longing for a place, as much as it is about longing for a time. The older we get, the more we turn to our memories and mourn lost time.” says Catherine.

Dovlatov died of heart failure in 1990, never living to see how his books finally began to be published in his homeland, how he became a classic and how he entered the school literature curriculum.