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Home > RU > About the Festival > Biography of S. D. Dovlatov Biography of S. D. Dovlatov
Sergey Dovlatov was born on September 3, 1941 in Ufa, in the evacuation.
Since 1944, his parents returned with him to Leningrad.
In 1958, he graduated from high school for ten years.
He worked for a year in the zincography of the printing house.
Volodarsky for obtaining work experience.
After that, he enters the Finnish department of the LSU Faculty of Philology.
In 1962, he was expelled for poor academic performance.
And in the same year, 1962, he was drafted into the army.
He gets into the paramilitary guard.
The first year of army service was spent in the North, in the Komi Republic.
The remaining two years were spent near Leningrad.
The experience of army life with constant monitoring of prisoners on the one hand and their guards on the other gave him a rich material for stories that later made up the book "The Zone".
Brodsky in the essay "About Seryozha Dovlatov" wrote: "Then he disappeared from the street, because he joined the army.
He returned from there, like Tolstoy from the Crimea, with a scroll of stories and a certain dazed look in his eyes."
After the army, Dovlatov enters the multi class Shipbuilding Institute "For personnel shipyards", goes to the evening Russian department of the phil faculty.
But very soon he will be transferred to the Faculty of Journalism.
After a short time, he stops classes, not feeling the need for them.
He writes stories all the time, communicates with other young writers and poets from Maramzin to Brodsky.
Later he worked as a literary secretary of Vera Panova, from time to time he writes internal reviews in the magazines "Neva" and "Zvezda".
In the autumn of 1972, Dovlatov left Leningrad for Estonia for several years - to Tallinn.
There he first works as a stoker.
The work schedule is convenient - the two of them once every four days, but he does not like the work itself.
Then Sergey Dovlatov becomes the executive secretary of the newspaper "Sailor of Estonia".
Later, he got a full time job in the daily newspaper "Soviet Estonia".
In Estonia, for the first time in many years, Dovlatov has hope of publishing his own book.
The publication is approved, the work is underway, the book "Five Corners" has already been typed in the printing house.
And then, during a search of one of Dovlatov's acquaintances, the KGB finds the manuscript of the "Zone" - and everything collapses.
The publication of the book is prohibited - the printing house was forced to scatter the finished set.
In "Soviet Estonia", a devastating meeting of the "labor collective" is held, which is traditional for such cases in the USSR, and then Dovlatov is fired.
He is trying to get an explanation from at least some official - whether a party official, the KGB: why was the book destroyed and for what exactly was he punished?
But there are no responsible persons.
Having failed to get any answer, Dovlatov returns to Leningrad, where he later manages to get a job at the magazine "Koster".
In 1976, Dovlatov's works were published by the Western magazines " Continent "and"Time and We".
This is another scandal for the Soviet government - and Dovlatov is expelled from the Union of Journalists of the USSR.
In the USSR, his stories were still not published.
As before Tallinn, the reviews of the publishers ' internal reviewers were very benevolent, even laudatory, but they ended with the same verdict: refuse.
And after the publications in Western magazines, the pressure of the KGB gradually increased, approaching the fact that the writer was faced with the same choice that the most determined dissidents faced: to sit or emigrate ("I left to become a writer, and became one, having made a simple choice between prison and New York").
But Dovlatov was not a dissident.
He was an artist.
He wrote ideologically alien stories, but did not fight the regime.
Later he thought about Pushkin: "His literature is above morality.
It defeats morality and even replaces it."
"He generally believed that literature and politics have nothing in common," Aryev writes in the introduction to the collection of Dovlatov's works.
Sergei believed that Brodsky's line "Even wicker chairs are held here by bolts and nuts" was more deadly for the Soviet government than the publication of detailed investigations about all Beria's crimes.
It is possible that this was the case.
On the recommendation of his university friend Andrey Aryev, Dovlatov comes to work as a guide in the Pushkin Nature Reserve for two summer seasons (1976 and 1977).
He rents a room in a house in the village of Berezino, not far from Mikhailovsky.
Later, in the 1990s, a retired Moscow teacher bought it from its former owners.
Since September 3, 2011, the house has officially become the Dovlatov House Museum.
There are no things belonging to Dovlatov in it, but the situation is recreated, reminiscent of the 70s of the last century.
Dovlatov was very sensitive to the work of Pushkin.
These Pushkin places have now become partly Dovlatov's: Dovlatov wrote the book "Reserve" based on his stay here.
In 1978, Sergey Dovlatov emigrated from the USSR.
He didnot want to leave for a long time.
He was very slowly approaching this difficult moment for himself.
His wife Elena Dovlatova and daughter Katya were already living in America by that time.
"Sergey has been going to leave for a very long time.
I think he decided that this is the last frontier of his life and he will never see this world again, " suggests Andrey Aryev, a friend of Dovlatov (now one of the chief editors of Zvezda magazine).
Dovlatov left to become a professional writer - and he became one.
During the 12 years of his life in exile, 12 books by Sergey Dovlatov were published in Russian.
He also wrote the book "Demarche of Enthusiasts" together with Vagrich Bakhchanyan and Naum Sagalovsky (1985) and a book about Russian culture in portraits and anecdotes - "Not only Brodsky" in collaboration with Marianna Volkova (1988).
In the United States, Sergey Dovlatov's stories are regularly published in the New Yorker magazine, which many famous American writers dreamed of such as Kurt Vonnegut, who sent Dovlatov a short letter about his publication in the New Yorker.
"The Invisible Book", "Solo on Underwood", "Compromise", "Zone", "Our", "March of the Lonely" - all these books are published for the first time and are translated into English, German, Indian, Polish and other languages.
In 1986, he became the winner of the American Pen Club for the best short story.
In the United States, Dovlatov received recognition as a writer, but he reflected on it like this: "God gave me exactly what I have been asking him for all my life.
He made me an ordinary writer.
Having become one, I was convinced that I was claiming more.
But it was too late.
They donot ask God for supplements."
"When I met him, I thought that for Seryozha, the main thing in life is girls.
Then I thought it was booze.
And only then I began to understand that the main thing for him is literature.
He himself recently claimed that the main thing for him is family, " Aryev recalls.
Dovlatov became one of the four people who created the newspaper "New American".
Later, he became its editor in chief, although in an interview with Viktor Yerofeyev, he emphasized: "It was more of a protocol position, but in fact there was a collegial leadership."
The newspaper became popular among Russian speaking emigrants.
Dovlatov's columns from The New American were later published as a separate book, The March of the Lonely (1983).
At the same time, Dovlatov works as a freelance correspondent for Radio Liberty.
Aryev recalls Dovlatov's words: "I can remember everything, but I canot even remember some places in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Mountains, my heart starts pounding so much."
On August 24, 1990, Sergey Dovlatov died in an ambulance in New York from heart failure.
The book "Reserve" in Russia was published two weeks after his death, and Andrey Aryev had to add an obituary to the cover.
Aryev also says something else: "The main dream of Seryozha Dovlatov was a very strange thing - he wanted the grandchildren of his enemies to read his stories with joy and a smile.
Grandchildren really read."
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2015 ©: Sergey Dovlatov's Festival"Reserve"
