THE REJECT

A friend plopped three volumes in worn-out dust jackets on my lap a
couple of months ago. They read: "Sergei Dovlatov". A Soviet Emigre
writer? In Russian? Why would I care to read him?

"Oh, give it a try, Misha," --- the friend said, --- "He is an easy read."

Great. Like I am looking for light reading. Oh, well, it is not like I
have to pay to read it, so I did give it a try. The volumes are a
strange surreal auto-biography of a person of surreal times. Dovlatov
would be a Soviet equivalent of a baby-boomer generation. He lived in
Leningrad (Russia's second largest city), got into college in early
60-ies, did not care for it, dropped out, was drafted to the army. In
one of his later endearing stories, he describes his younger bumbling
self falling hopelessly and deeply in love with a beautiful girl. His
love was all consuming and self-destructive, complete with incredible
fits of jealousy and apathy to anything but the object of his
desire. He blames this for his dropping out of college. I do not think
it is entirely true but it makes a nice story.

Dovlatov spent three years as a guard in a northern labor camp. This
experience changed him so much that he had trouble relating to his old
civilian friends. He started writing then. The stories of the prison
guard period are the most poignant, harrowing and unsettling of his
prose.

When he came back he tried earning a living as a journalist and
a writer. The Soviet system slowly ground him into dust. The Soviet
censors refused to publish his prison guard stories. At some point, the
KGB confiscated the manuscript and never gave it back. He managed to
smuggle the excerpts to the West and publish them there. It was all
that survived.

Journalism was a cursed profession under the Soviets. He was forced to
write cheerful stories affirming the wonderful life in the country of
victorious proletariat while the truth was stupid, grim and
occasionally ugly. One of his novels of that period is a collection of
his newspaper articles and the sordid back story attached to each one
of them. Through these years Dovlatov seem to oscillate between heavy
drinking and raging alcoholism. He could not earn a living. His family
fell apart.

Dovlatov resisted immigration at first. However, in mid-70-ies he
could not take it anymore and left for New York. There comes probably
the least interesting, for me, part of his life. He became just
another fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, complete with a set of naive
immigrant attitudes. Everybody over here is just dying to listen to
his story. He is going to write these wonderful novels that the
Soviets never let him to. English would either miraculously percolate
into his head or the locals would just pick up Russian.

To top it off, Dovlatov was a Russian writer. An occupation that is
not in terribly great demand in the new world. His most powerful tool,
his language, was nearly useless. In his early 30-ies, an old man to
be sure, he thought he was too old to learn English. Hence, he
relegated himself to Russian emigre culture. A truly pitiful
fate. It is as if the escaped prisoners, instead of going away and
enjoying the newly found freedom, are forced to hang around the prison
walls and discuss the goings on in the very same prison they escaped
from.

As all recent immigrants, Dovlatov thought of Americans as naive
simpletons who neither understand the complexities of the outside
world nor appreciated how good they have it here. Dovlatov did not
realize that the joke was on him.

Dovlatov deserves credit for making something out of himself on this
side of the Atlantic. With no knowledge of English, he and his friends
tried to start a Russian emigre newspaper. They learned the hard way
that in the country of victorious capitalism a printed word is a
product: for the newspaper to be successful, it needs to be
sold. Dovlatov worked in the Russian Service of Radio Liberty:
broadcasting back across the prison walls of the Iron Curtain. His
major success was the publication of some of his stories in The New
Yorker. It seems his heavy drinking has caught up with him. He died
aged 49.

* * *

What do I think of Sergei Dovlatov?

In high-school back in the Soviet days, one of my most hated subjects
was Russian Literature. They were always chattering about the rejected
people: a common literary character pervading the pages of Pushkin's,
Chekhov's, Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's novels. The communists made a
point of talking about these rejects as an illustration of the evils
of the old political system.

Dovlatov is a quintessential reject of the Soviet system. He was
created by the system, he matured struggling in and against it, he
then escaped; yet, did not really manage to survive outside of it.

I am glad I read Dovlatov. Reading him was a journey and an
experience. He also reminded once again that I came to this country
not only to get better shoes or a bigger car, but for intellectual
freedom; freedom to read and think about anything I please. And this
freedom is to be cherished.