Biography

Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov (‹See Tfd›Russian: Сергей Донатович Довлатов; 3 September 1941 – 24 August 1990) was a Soviet journalist and writer. Internationally, he is one of the most popular Russian writers of the late 20th century. Dovlatov was born on 3 September 1941 in Ufa, the capital of Bashkir ASSR in the Soviet Union, where his family had been evacuated in the beginning of World War II from Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and lived with a collaborator of The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) for three years. His mother, Nora Dovlatova, was Armenian and worked as a proofreader, and his father, Donat Mechik, was Jewish and a theater director.

After 1944, he lived with his mother in Leningrad. Dovlatov studied at the Finnish Department of Leningrad State University, but flunked after two and a half years. There, he became acquainted with the Leningrad poets Yevgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman, Joseph Brodsky, the writer Sergey Wolf, and the artist Alexander Ney.

He was drafted into the Soviet Internal Troops and served as a prison guard in high-security camps. Later, he earned his living as a journalist in various newspapers and magazines in Leningrad and then as a correspondent of the Tallinn newspaper "Sovetskaya Estonia" (Советская Эстония/Soviet Estonia). He supplemented his income by being a summer tour guide in Mikhaylovskoye Museum Reserve, a museum near Pskov dedicated to Alexander Pushkin. Dovlatov wrote prose fiction, but his numerous attempts to get published in the Soviet Union were in vain.

Unable to publish in the Soviet Union, Dovlatov circulated his writings through samizdat and by having them smuggled into Western Europe for publication in foreign journals; an activity that caused his expulsion from the Union of Soviet Journalists in 1976. The Western Russian-Language magazines which published his work include "Continent" and "Time and Us." The typeset 'formes' of his first book were destroyed under the order of the KGB.

In 1979, Dovlatov emigrated from the Soviet Union with his mother, Nora, and came to live with his wife and daughter in New York City, where he later co-edited The New American, a liberal, Russian-language émigré newspaper. In the early 1980s, Dovlatov finally achieved recognition as a writer, being printed in the prestigious magazine The New Yorker. Dovlatov died of heart failure on 24 August 1990 in New York City and was buried at the Mount Hebron Cemetery.