Sergei Dovlatov — writer with roots in the USSR
Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov was born Sergei Mechik on 3 September 1941 in Ufa, the capital of the Bashkir ASSR, where his parents had been evacuated from Leningrad during the war. His father, Donat Mechik, was a Jewish theatre director; his mother, Nora Dovlatova, was Armenian, had been an actress and later worked as a proofreader. His father soon left the family, and from 1945 Sergei lived with his mother in Leningrad, eventually taking her surname.
He studied Finnish at Leningrad University for two and a half years, and there met the young poets Yevgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman and Joseph Brodsky. After leaving the university he was drafted, and served as a guard in high-security prison camps, the experience behind his book The Zone. Back in Leningrad he worked as a journalist, and from 1972 to 1975 lived in Tallinn, where he wrote for Sovetskaya Estonia and other papers. His fiction could not be published in the Soviet Union: the typeset pages of his first book were broken up, he circulated his stories in samizdat, and after some of them appeared in émigré magazines such as Kontinent in 1976 he was expelled from the Union of Journalists.
In August 1978 he left the Soviet Union, spending some weeks in Vienna, where he wrote stories that were soon published abroad, and in early 1979 joined his wife and daughter in New York. With other émigrés he founded the Russian-language weekly The New American, of which he was editor-in-chief from 1980 until it closed in 1982, and he worked for Radio Liberty. Through Brodsky he met the translator Anne Frydman, who introduced his work to The New Yorker; eight of his stories appeared there through the 1980s.
In twelve years in America he published twelve books, among them The Compromise (1981), The Zone, The Suitcase, Pushkin Hills (published in 1983 as Zapovednik), A Foreign Woman and Affiliate, short, dry and humorous accounts of Soviet and émigré life, largely autobiographical. He died in New York on 24 August 1990, aged forty-eight, and is buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens.
In the years after his death his books were published in Russia in large editions and found a wide readership. In 2014 a street in Queens was named Sergei Dovlatov Way.
Tracing the roots — Ufa, Bashkir ASSR (USSR); raised in Leningrad
Born in Ufa in 1941 to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother, both from the Leningrad theatre world, he grew up in Leningrad, worked as a journalist there and in Tallinn, and emigrated with his family in 1978–79 after his prose could not be published in the Soviet Union.
Ufa, Bashkir ASSR (USSR); raised in Leningrad. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"I worked as a guard. I guarded people who were worse than me, guarded by people who were worse than them."