Sergei
Dovlatov
Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov (Mechik) (Russian:
Серге́й Дона́тович Довла́тов (Ме́чик); 3
September 1941, Ufa, USSR – 24 August 1990, New
York, USA) was a Russian journalist and writer.
Dovlatov
was born on September 3, 1941 in Ufa, Republic
of Bashkiria, USSR, where his family had been
evacuated during World War II from Leningrad.
His mother was an Armenian and his father was
Jewish. After 1945 he lived with his mother in
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Dovlatov studied
at the Finnish Department of Leningrad State
University, but flunked after two and a half
years. He was drafted into the Soviet Internal
Troops and served as a prison guard in
high-security camps. Later, he earned his living
as a journalist in various newspapers and
magazines in Leningrad and then as a
correspondent of the Tallinn newspaper "Soviet
Estonia". He supplemented his income by being a
summer tour guide in the Pushkin preserve, a
museum near Pskov. Dovlatov wrote prose fiction,
but his numerous attempts to get published in
the Soviet Union were in vain. The set of his
first book was destroyed under the order of the
KGB. In 1976, some stories by Dovlatov had been
published in Western Russian-language magazines,
including "Continent", "Time and us", resulting
in his expulsion from the Union of Journalists
of the USSR.
In 1979
Dovlatov emigrated from the Soviet Union with
his mother, Nora, and came to live with his wife
and daughter in New York, where he later
co-edited "The New American", a liberal,
Russian-language émigré newspaper. In the mid
80's, Dovlatov finally achieved recognition as a
writer, being printed in the prestigious
magazine "The New Yorker". Dovlatov died on
August 24, 1990 in New York and was buried at
the Mount Hebron Cemetery.
Sergei Dovlatov published twelve books in the
USA and Europe during his twelve years as an
immigrant. In the Soviet Union, the writer was
known from Samizdat and Radio Liberty. After his
death and the fall of the Soviet Union, numerous
collections of his short stories were finally
published in Russia.
