Sergei Dovlatov
| Sergei Dovlatov Серге́й Дона́тович Довла́тов |
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Sergei Dovlatov on the front cover of one of his books
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| Born | Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov-Mechik September 3, 1941 Ufa, Republic of Bashkiria, RSFSR, USSR |
| Died | August 24, 1990 (aged 48) New York City, New York, USA |
| Occupation | Journalist and writer |
| Nationality | Russian & American |
| Period | 1977–1990 |
Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov-Mechik (Russian: Серге́й Дона́тович Довла́тов; September 3, 1941 in Ufa, RSFSR, USSR – August 24, 1990 in New York City) was a Russian journalist and writer. He is one of the most popular Russian writers of the late 20th century in the world.
Dovlatov was born on September 3, 1941 in Ufa, Republic of Bashkiria within RSFSR, USSR, where his family had been evacuated in the beginning of World War II from Leningrad 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 (now St. Petersburg). Dovlatov studied at the Finnish Department of Leningrad State University, but flunked after two and a half years. There he socialized with the Leningrad poets Yevgeny Rain, 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 "Sovetskaja Estonia" (Советская Эстония/Soviet Estonia). He supplemented his income by being a summer tour guide in the Pushkin preserve, a museum near Pskov. 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 typeset 'formes' of his first book were destroyed under the order of the KGB. In 1976, some stories by Dovlatov had been published in Western Russian-language magazines, including "Continent", "Time and us", resulting in his expulsion from the Union of Journalists of the USSR.
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