This is one of the most honest books about the great Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov, born in 1941 in Ufa and died in 1990 in New York. His friend and biographer, Lyudmila Stern, recounts the comic and tragic episodes of her hero's life, as well as the literary figures who became symbols of a generation: Brodsky, Rein, Nabokov, Hemingway, Efimov, Gordin... The book will be useful to anyone interested in 20th-century literature and the history of emigration.