Sergei Dovlatov — writer with roots in the USSR
Sergei Dovlatov was a Russian-American writer born in Ufa who never managed to publish a single story in the Soviet Union despite years of trying — but became one of the most beloved Russian-language authors of the 20th century after emigrating to New York in 1979. His autobiographical fiction about Soviet absurdity and immigrant life in America is read worldwide.
Tracing the roots — Ufa / Leningrad
Born in Ufa in 1941 to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother, Dovlatov worked as a prison guard in the Gulag (providing material for his novel The Zone), as a journalist in Leningrad, and finally as a guide at Pushkin's estate — before emigrating to New York where The New Yorker finally published the stories that the Soviet Union had refused. He died in New York in 1990.
Ufa / 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."