Dovlatov in America

Midway through Pushkin Hills, Sergei Dovlatov’s novel based on his experiences as a tour guide in Soviet Russia, there’s a conversation between a writer who, like Dovlatov, is having trouble getting his stories published, and a woman who, like Dovlatov’s ex-wife Elena, is trying to persuade him to emigrate with her to the United States.

“This is where my readers are. And there ... who needs my stories in Chicago?”

“Who needs them here? The headwaiter in Crescent Shore, who doesn’t even read the menu?”

“Everybody. It’s just that nobody has guessed it yet.”

As a novel set on a tourist attraction – the family estate of Alexander Pushkin – Pushkin Hills is grim and funny, full of the sorrowful Russian humor critics call “laughter through tears.”

But it’s also the book that Dovlatov, stymied by Soviet censorship, wrote just before he threw in the towel and followed his ex-wife and daughter to America. The passage in which the protagonist, Boris Alikhanov, argues with Tanya about the sacrifices he would have to make as a writer if he left Russia, is prophetic.

It sums up what happened to Dovlatov after he joined the so-called “Third Wave” of Russian émigrés, quitting the Soviet Union to settle in Forest Hills, Queens.

The 12 years between his arrival in New York and his death at age 48 in an ambulance on the way to Coney Island Hospital were the most fruitful in Dovlatov’s career. Between 1978 and 1990, he wrote the stories and novels that placed him at the forefront of the last generation of Soviet writers – the poets and novelists who came of age just as the Thaw initiated by Nikita Khrushchev gave way to the return of Communist Party orthodoxy, stifling creativity and dissent.

He was an unusual person. Good-looking, with a thick beard and mustache in his later years, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the movie actor Omar Sharif. The son of an Armenian actress and Jewish theater director, he drank like a Russian muzhik, going off on binges that lasted days and ultimately destroyed his health. Twice married and twice divorced, he was father of four children by three women, one of whom was his common-law wife.

Sergei Dovlatov was born Sept. 3, 1941, in the Soviet Republic of Bashkortostan, where his parents, both members of the intelligentsia, were evacuated until 1944 to escape the siege of Leningrad. His mother, Nora Sergeyevna, quit acting to become a literary proofreader. His father, Donat Isaakovich Mechik, deserted the family for Sergei’s nanny when the boy was eight. In one of the many personal letters scattered throughout The Zone, Memoirs of a Prison Guard, Dovlatov downplayed the impact that his parents’ divorce had on him. “I didn’t get an orphan’s complex. The fathers of people my age had perished on the front.”

But Tamara Zibunova, Dovlatov’s common-law wife in Estonia, said there were lasting effects from the breakup. “The feeling of inferiority never left him,” she said in a 2004 newspaper interview. “He would sometimes scream at me and reproach me for the fact that I grew up in an intact family, that I never exhibited false modesty, that I was never sent off somewhere to live.”

Dovlatov (he took his stepfather’s surname after his mother remarried) was a natural storyteller. As a boy, he seized on what was curious and funny and spun tales about it, regaling his family, friends and neighbors with stories taken from life. At Leningrad State University, where he enrolled in 1959 to study Finnish, he fell in with a group of poets influenced by the twentieth-century American writers who were just then being translated and published in the Soviet Union.

“My generation came of age during the so-called Khrushchev Thaw, when the iron curtain was lifted slightly and we were given access to the previously forbidden fruit of ‘bourgeois’ culture. Considerably later than our contemporaries in the West, we learned the names of Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck, Saroyan, Cheever, Fitzgerald, Updike, Vonnegut and Salinger,” Dovlatov said in a 1983 interview with Jane Bobko in The Threepenny Review. “Their prose differed in important respects not only from lifeless, bombastic, and pious Soviet writing, but also from Russian classical literature. What struck us was the aesthetic brilliance of Western, and particularly American literature, its genuine tragic note, attention to real human problems, and competent observation of life.”

He began to write short stories and read them in public.

“I just remember it was hilarious. I just couldn’t help myself. I giggled. I laughed out loud,” said the émigré photographer Mark Serman, who was 16 or 17 when he heard Dovlatov read one of his stories at the writers group organized by David Yakovlevich Ryvkin, or Dar.

“He had an incredible talent at speaking,” Serman said. “He had a beautiful baritone voice. And he was an immediate success whenever he spoke anywhere in a small company of people who would just listen to him and shut up for a while.”

At the same time, Dovlatov fell under the influence of writers like Hemingway and Vonnegut, he fell under the spell of Asetrina (Asya) Pekurovskaya, a stunning beauty who left him for the published writer Vasily Aksyonov not long after they were wed.

“It was a student marriage,” Pekurovskaya said in a 2015 newspaper interview. “Sergei was an attractive, very talented, improbably sharp-witted person. He sang, he drew pictures. But then I fell in love with another young person, owned up to it immediately, and left Seryozha. He pursued me, begged me to come back to him. He was never able to forgive me and forget.”

“By then, there was a noticeable decline in my academic progress. Earlier, there had been a decline in Asya’s academic progress. In the dean’s office, they started to raise questions about our moral make-up. I’ve noticed that, when a person is in love and in debt, his moral make-up becomes a topic of discussion.

“In short, things were bad.”

“Nylon Finnish Socks,” from The Suitcase

It’s often difficult, in a Dovlatov story, to know where fact ends and fiction begins. “I mix truth and invention in such capricious combinations that there are times I myself can’t distinguish one from the other,” Dovlatov told Bobko. But his short stories and novels are full of things that really happened, people he actually knew. For example, his second wife Elena, who was determined to emigrate, even if it meant abandoning him. “I was struck by how made up her mind was,” Dovlatov says in the short story, “Poplin Shirt.” “After all, Lena always seemed dependent and submissive. And suddenly, such a serious, final decision.” Or his first wife, Asya, who graduated from Leningrad State University, left Russia and got a teaching job at Stanford. “Asya successfully emigrated,” Dovlatov says at the conclusion of “Nylon Finnish Socks.” “She teaches lexicology at Stanford. Which makes American academia seem very strange.”

Dovlatov was expelled after his third year at the university, ostensibly for poor grades but in fact because he had communicated with foreigners and had a big mouth, Jekaterina Young says in Sergei Dovlatov and His Narrative Masks (Northwestern University Press, 2009). He was drafted and, probably because of his imposing size – he was more than six feet tall – trained as a guard and dispatched to a hard labor camp for nonpolitical prisoners in Komi. A friend, the poet Joseph Brodsky, said that, when Dovlatov was discharged from the army, the budding writer was like “Tolstoy returning from Crimea, with a stack of stories and a starry-eyed look on his face.”

In fact, Komi was both good and bad for Dovlatov. The paradox of prison camp life – there was nothing, in Dovlatov’s eyes, that distinguished the prison guards from the prisoners – shaped his outlook and provided material for his writing, laying the groundwork for The Zone; “The Officer’s Belt” (a short story included in The Suitcase); and one of his last stories, “An Old Rooster Baked in Clay.”

In other respects, however, the three years spent as a prison guard were a setback for Dovlatov, who found, on returning to Leningrad, that he had fallen behind in his literary career: “I was like a soldier returning from the front who discovers that his friends at home had gotten ahead. My medals jingled like a joker’s bells… I began to fret about everything… It was necessary to find work. It seemed to me at the time that journalism was akin to literature.”

Dovlatov enrolled in the journalism program at Leningrad State University. He landed a job on For Shipyard Workers (За кадры верфям), the factory newspaper published by the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute (now the St. Petersburg Naval Technological Institute). Dovlatov spent three and half years at the newspaper For Shipyard Workers, rising to the level of editor before quitting the job in 1969. Two years later, after a series of odd jobs, he decamped to Tallinn, where the atmosphere was considerably more relaxed, the politics considerably more liberal, than in Leningrad. He became a correspondent for the newspapers Soviet Estonia and The Evening Tallinn, remaining in Tallinn three years.

They weren’t demanding jobs. In the words of culture historian Lev Lurie, “the work of a journalist in those days consisted of nothing but lying. It was necessary to write about top-ranking workers, to give in to perfectly comical assignments, which, I should say, Dovlatov fulfilled with unusual virtuosity. Sometimes he wasn’t bad.”

Newspapers gave Dovlatov the time to write not just the puff pieces demanded by his editors, but also the literary fiction he put ahead of everything else. The problem was the puff pieces made print. The literary fiction didn’t. The Thaw initiated by Nikita Khrushchev had ended, replaced by the ideological rigidity and intellectual stagnation of the Brezhnev era.

As the journalist Alla Borisova put it: “Falling into that strange crack that came between the Thaw, when he was still too young, and the tightening of the ideological screws, when it was already too late to break into the ranks of established writers, he nevertheless wanted to be recognized and published. It wasn’t destined to happen. Not even when he wrote a workmanlike, ideologically correct novel, or when he moved to liberal Tallinn… His strangeness was written into the record and wasn’t subject to review.”

Some of it was plain bad luck. In 1975, when Dovlatov’s first book, a collection of stories titled The Five Corners, Notes of a City Dweller, was about to be published, the KGB found a copy of the manuscript in the apartment of a Estonian dissident who had petitioned the United Nations for independence. The publisher was ordered not to print the book, and Dovlatov was fired from Soviet Estonia.

But mostly Dovlatov’s inability to get into print was because of what Borisova called his “strangeness”: A mode of narration that combined documentary storytelling with fictional artifice, a writing style that substituted everyday language for literary prose, a biting wit that laid bare the absurdities of Soviet life.

Then there was Dovlatov’s refusal to take sides, to divide the characters in his books into heroes and villains. That was anathema to a system that expected its writers to take part in the effort to build socialism. Even during the Thaw, “it remained the case that an author was expected to make his moral sympathies clear,” Jekaterina Young wrote. “Authors were not supposed to adopt a position of neutrality.”

“You know, Dovlatov, you’re quite a writer. You’ve got erudition, a sense of humor, an original style. But you lack precision, self-discipline. It’s time you got down to business. Took your reporting to the next level. Here’s something newsworthy: From the Paide region we’re informed a certain Papes has produced a record amount of milk.”

“Papes, a cow?”

“Papes, a dairymaid.”

The Compromise

The Compromise chronicles Dovlatov’s years as a reporter in Estonia. Each chapter of the book is prefaced with a news story he wrote, followed by a fictionalized account of what happened. In every case, the fictionalized account rings truer than what was published as fact.

The dairymaid whose cow produced a record-breaking amount of milk has supposedly sent Brezhnev a telegram boasting about the accomplishment. But no such telegram exists. Dovlatov’s job is to interview the hopelessly inarticulate dairymaid, put words in her mouth and compose the telegram so his newspaper can front-page Brezhnev’s reply.

In another story, it’s November 1975, and the Communist Party is preparing to celebrate the 31st anniversary of Estonia’s liberation from Nazi Germany. Dovlatov is dispatched to the maternity ward of a hospital to await the birth of the jubilee boy, the city’s 400,000th resident, and to interview the happy parents.

But the four hundred thousandth baby is born to a Russian mother and an Ethiopian father. Although the Ethiopian is respectable, a student in the naval academy, the city editor isn’t pleased. “Dovlatov, I’m going to fire you,” he screams over the telephone. “For trying to discredit all that’s excellent. Lay off your filthy Ethiopian. Wait for a normal – do you hear me? – a normal human child!”

“The Jubilee Boy” was first published in English translation in The New Yorker on June 2, 1980, just two years after Dovlatov quit the Soviet Union and emigrated first to Vienna, then to New York.

That story was followed by a stream of others, some appearing in The New Yorker, others in books issued by English-language publishers or by the Russian-language press.

Dovlatov’s success at getting his work into print in America was remarkable, particularly in light of his inability to get nothing but a few stories published in the USSR. “Dear Sergei Dovlatov! I love you too, but you have broken my heart. I was born in this country and fearlessly served it during the war, but I still haven’t managed to sell a single story of mine to The New Yorker,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. “And now you come, and – bang! – your story is published at once…. I expect much from you and your work. You’ve got talent, which you are ready to give away to this mad country. We are happy you are here.”

Dovlatov’s decision to emigrate was precipitated by his expulsion in 1976 from the Union of Soviet Journalists, which left him without a well-paying job, and by the harassment he received from the authorities, who were angered by the publication of his work in the émigré journals Kontinent (The Continental) and Vremya i My. That anger is memorably depicted in the harangue that a KGB major, Vitaly Belyaev, delivers to Boris Alikhanov in Pushkin Hills.

“Can you guess why I’ve invited you here? You can’t guess? Excellent. Ask me questions, pointed questions, the kind they ask in the military. ‘Why, Belyaev, did you invite me here?’ And I’ll answer, just as pointedly, the way they answer in the military, ‘I don’t know. I have no idea.’ I feel bad. I feel a young fellow has lost his way, wandered from the straight and narrow path… gone very far astray... Contributes to this, well, publication, The Continental. A propaganda mill not unlike Radio Liberty. Has turned himself into a literary traitor as bad as Solzhenitsyn. And, to top it all off, he’s gone around with that loudmouth Valera, getting drunk…”

Pushkin Hills

Belyaev encourages Alikhanov to join his ex-wife Tanya in emigration, the same way the KGB encouraged Dovlatov to follow his ex-wife Elena and their then 12-year-old daughter Katherine out of the USSR in 1978.

When Dovlatov pointed out that he and Elena were divorced, the KGB told him the divorce was a formality and “we aren’t formalists,” according to Jekaterina Young. By then, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which called upon the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate, had become a kind of pressure valve in Soviet society. It was being used by the authorities to hasten the departure of anyone who threatened the status quo.

Alikhanov dreads emigration. In a conversation with Tanya, he equates it to an almost total loss of self.

“What’s holding you back? The Hermitage, the Neva, birch trees?” Tanya demands.

“Birch trees don’t excite me.”

“What then?”

“Language. In a foreign language we lose 80 percent of our personality. The ability to tell jokes, to speak ironically, goes right out the window. That alone terrifies me.”

Dovlatov’s life in America picked up where Pushkin Hills left off. He moved into an apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, with Elena and Katherine. He founded a weekly newspaper, The Novy Amerikanets (New American), which featured the work of émigré photographers, including Mark Serman and Nina Alovert, and émigré writers, such as Alexander Genis and Peter Vail. He started to make money from his writing, hosted broadcasts on Radio Liberty, bought a summer house in the Catskills, got himself a good car.

But the Novy Amerikanets folded after two years. The newspaper was unable to pay its debts, despite having 11,000 subscribers. The English translations of Dovlatov’s books didn’t do well. “It’s well known that Americans prefer their own literature,” Dovlatov said in The Foreign Woman. “Translated books rarely become bestsellers here. The only exception is the Bible.”

And Dovlatov began to suffer the pangs of exile. He began to miss Russia and long for Russian readers from whom he could get feedback about his work.

“In the Soviet Union, for well-known reasons, officially approved writers enjoyed immense prestige, but being a nonconformist writer carried its own social prestige and recognition, too. In the West there was no recognition for these latter except among fellow émigré writers, and even that was not always forthcoming,” Young writes. “This was bound to take a psychological toll on the writer, who now found that he had the freedom to write whatever he liked, but nobody wanted to read it.”

As Dovlatov himself put it in a 1984 New York Times interview: “‘The audience shrinks. The old people die. Emigration is dropping. Our children in the next generation, like my daughter, are already not reading Russian.”

There was no going back, at least not right away. Third-Wave Russian émigrés were in effect exiles. “Because, when we left Russia, we knew we’d never go back and see our friends and relatives,” Nina Alovert said in an interview. “We didn’t have citizenship anymore.” As far as the government was concerned, “we were like enemies.”

During the Gorbachev era, when open dialogue became possible and some writers considered returning to the Soviet Union, Dovlatov hesitated, holding out for an official invitation: “I would like to come not just as a New York Jew, but as a writer,” he said in a letter to his friend and editor, Andrei Aryev. “I am used to this status and I don’t want to give it up even for a short period.”

Dovlatov began to suffer from bouts of depression, to go on drinking binges that doctors warned – he had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver – would kill him. At the same time, he continued to write and to correspond with friends in Russia and Eastern Europe, telling them about the dilemma he faced in America: absolute freedom to publish, relative indifference to his work.

“I’m neither rich nor poor, to the extent that all that is relative. I’m simply an ethnic writer, living 4,000 kilometers from his audience,” Dovlatov said in a letter to Tamara Zibunova. “For all that, it’s turned out that I am a much more of a Russian – or, more precisely – much more of a Russian citizen, than it seemed to me, I’m absolutely incapable of changing and adapting,… so that I can live assimilated in a foreign country, even one as satisfied, robust and remarkable as this.

“Emigration is the biggest unhappiness of my life,” he continued, “at the same time it was the only real way out, the only opportunity to pursue my chosen work. For all that I still dream about Shcherbakov Street in Leningrad or that basement store on Rabchinskaya Street. From the most extreme form of depression, I’m protected by the certainty that sooner or later I’ll return home, either as a living person or as a living writer. Without that certainty I would simply go out of my mind.”

Friends disagree about Dovlatov’s state of mind before his death. The writer Alexander Genis said in an interview that Dovlatov was happy to be working on a new collection of his work, which was going to be titled The Refrigerator and include two new stories, “Grapes,” and “An Old Rooster Baked in Clay.”

Although he had started drinking again, he would sober up at night and spend hours writing, Genis said.

The poet Yevgeny Rein said in a 2010 newspaper interview that Dovlatov was depressed, and connected the depression to the feeling of separation that followed his departure from Russia. Being uprooted from his native land had a ruinous effect on his life and work, he said. The material he had gathered in the Soviet Union, in Russia, was exhausted, and on American themes he either didn’t want to write, or couldn’t. Toward the end of his life, he was in a terrible depression, and drank heavily.

The drinking got worse. Dovlatov went off on a binge. He disappeared for several days, then began to call on the telephone, Genis said, the way he always did when he started to sober up.

“To listen to his labored, but nevertheless measured speech, punctuated by jokes and descriptions of the hallucinations he was having, was horrible, but not hopeless,” Genis wrote in his book, Dovlatov and Environs. “I thought that he had finally had enough. That, since he was so frightened, things would work out, the nightmare would finally end, and another life would begin. So I didn’t believe it when he died.”

Dovlatov died of heart failure on Aug. 24, 1990. The Soviet Union collapsed a year later. By 1991, when his books finally began to be published in Russia, he was already well-known. Russians knew him from the books smuggled in from abroad, the stories published in émigré journals, the works circulated in samizdat. People loved him, Nina Alovert said, because “he didn’t judge them, didn’t bring them to court. He was one of them. He was absolutely loyal to the people whom he lived with.”

He was also nonpolitical, a characteristic that’s endeared him to the younger generation of Russian readers who, according to a recent article in The Economist, feel disenfranchised by the Putin regime.

“Campaign workers were going door to door, persuading residents to vote as early as possible. I wasn’t in a hurry. I hadn’t voted in three elections. Not because I considered myself a dissident. But because I hated doing things that made no sense.”

“The Poplin Shirt”

On Sept. 2- 4, 2016, when the Day of Dovlatov, an event organized by Lev Lurie took place, big crowds gathered in St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, to celebrate what would have been Sergei Dovlatov’s 75th birthday.

A statue of Dovlatov was unveiled, tours of his apartment were given, and photographs of Dovlatov in America were exhibited, some by Alovert, others by Serman. Both attended the celebration as guests.

Serman’s photos were hung in the Angleterre Hotel, where one day a girl about 14 read the novel Pushkin Hills aloud to a packed conference room.

The room was by turns noisy and quiet, Serman said. The crowd tried to listen attentively, but couldn’t control itself and burst out laughing, just as Serman did when he was 16 or 17 and heard Dovlatov read aloud. RL