Sergei Donatowitsch Dovlatow

Sergei Donatowitsch Dowlatow ( Russian Сергей Донатович Довлатов , scientific transliteration Sergej Donatovič Dovlatov ; born September 3, 1941 in Ufa ; † August 24, 1990 in New York City ) was a Russian writer .

Life

Dowlatow was born in 1941 in Ufa, Soviet Union, where his family had been evacuated during World War II . His father was Jewish , his mother an Armenian . After 1945 he lived with his family in Leningrad . Dovlatov studied philology at Leningrad University , but was de-registered after two and a half years. He served in the Red Army in the guard of the strict prison camps in the Komi Republic . From 1972 to 1975 he earned his living as a journalist for the Tallinn newspaper Soviet Estonia , and in the summer he also took tourists through the Pushkin memorials near Pskov .

Numerous attempts by Dowlatov to publish his prose in Soviet magazines were in vain. The (printing) set of his first book was destroyed on the orders of the KGB . After the publication of some of Dowlatow's stories in western magazines such as Continent , Time and We in 1976, he was expelled from the Union of Journalists of the USSR.

In 1978 he left the Soviet Union and went with his family to New York, where he later co-edited The New American , a liberal , Russian- language newspaper for immigrants . In the mid-1980s, Dowlatow finally achieved his greatest success as a writer when he published in prestigious magazines The New Yorker and Partisan Review . Dowlatow died on August 24, 1990 in New York City and was buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery.

During his twelve years as an emigrant, Sergei Dovlatov published twelve books in the United States and Europe . In the Soviet Union he was known for the Samizdat and Radio Swoboda . After the collapse of the Soviet Union , numerous collections of his short stories were also published in Russia.

Quote: “I just want to be like Chekhov ”.

Works published in German

• Our men. A Russian family album. ( Naši. ) S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-10-015308-1 .
• The suitcase. ( Čemodan. ) DuMont, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-8321-8073-7 .
• The compromise. ( Compromise. ) Pano-Verlag, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-907576-97-7 .

Filmography

• Alexei German (screenplay, production): Dovlatov . The film biography about Dovlatov's everyday life in 1971 in Leningrad. Russia, En, De, 2018; 126 min

Web links

• Literature by and about Sergei Donatowitsch Dowlatow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Trilingual pages about Dowlatow
• Does fate have a right to irony? Olga Martynova on Dowlatow's The Suitcase , Frankfurter Rundschau from September 7, 2009.