Sergei Dovlatov

Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov was a Russian writer.

He was born on September 3, 1941, in Ufa, into the family of theater director Donat Isaakovich Mechik (1909–1995) and literary proofreader Nora Sergeyevna Dovlatova (1908–1999). From 1944, he lived in Leningrad. In 1959, he entered the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad University (Finnish language), which he had to leave after two and a half years of study. From 1962 to 1965, he served in the army, in the system of security for corrective labor camps in the north of the Komi ASSR. After demobilization, Dovlatov entered the Faculty of Journalism, worked as a journalist for a factory wall newspaper, and began writing short stories.

He was a member of the Leningrad writers’ group “Gorozhane” (“Townspeople”) together with V. Maramzin, I. Yefimov, B. Vakhin, and others. At one time he worked as a secretary for V. Panova. In 1972–1976, he lived in Tallinn, working as a correspondent for the Tallinn newspaper Soviet Estonia and as a tour guide in the Pushkin Nature Reserve near Pskov (Mikhailovskoye). In 1976, he returned to Leningrad. He worked for the magazine Kostyor. He wrote prose, but numerous attempts to get published in Soviet magazines came to nothing. The typeset of his first book was destroyed on KGB orders. From the late 1960s, Dovlatov was published in samizdat, and in 1976 some of his stories were published in the West in the magazines Kontinent and Vremya i my, for which he was expelled from the USSR Union of Journalists.

In 1978, due to persecution by the authorities, Dovlatov emigrated to Vienna and then moved to New York, where he published the bold liberal émigré newspaper Novy Amerikanets. Book after book of his prose appeared: The Invisible Book (1978), Solo on Underwood (1980), the novellas The Compromise (1981), The Zone (