Sergei Dovlatov was born in 1941, in Ufa, in the Republic of Bashkiria; his family had been evacuated there from Leningrad during the Second World War. His mother was Armenian, his father Jewish and a distinguished theater director. His intensely autobiographical work – warmly and casually mixing fiction and fact; often jocosely combining fiction with what postmodernism calls metafiction (that is, commentary on fiction-making) – offers the reader a vital picture of the usual bald biographical summary. In his writing, including this book, we learn about the many phases of his short life (he died in 1990, in New York City): about his parents and their work in the theater (the wonderful story, “Fernand Léger’s Jacket”); about the time he spent, in the early 1960s, as a prison guard in the Soviet camp system (The Zone); about his work as a journalist, in Leningrad and Estonia (The Suitcase and The Compromise); the summer he spent as an official guide at the Pushkin Preserve, south of Pskov (Pushkin Hills).
Dovlatov was not published in Russia during his lifetime. During the 1970s, he circulated his writing in samizdat and began to be published in European journals, an activity which brought about his expulsion from the Union of Soviet Journalists in 1976. He left the Soviet Union in 1978 and arrived in New York in 1979 to join his wife and daughter, part of the so-called “third wave” of Russian immigration (an anxious transit anticipated in Pushkin Hills and more fully described in A Foreign Woman and the memoir, Ours, which traces the stories of four generations of his family). In New York, Dovlatov quickly became one of the most prominent and popular members of the Russian émigré community. He co-edited The New American, a liberal émigré newspaper, and worked for Radio Liberty. But mainly he wrote: twelve books in the last twelve years of his life. The Compromise appeared in 1981, The Zone a year later, Ours in 1983, A Foreign Woman in 1986, the same year that The Suitcase was published. These books were written in Russian and published by small presses, such as the Hermitage Press in Tenafly, New Jersey, or Russica, in New York. It was only in the mid-1980s, when Dovlatov was beginning to reach a wider audience (partly due to the publication of several of his stories in The New Yorker), that English-language publishers took an interest: The Zone was published in English translation in 1985 (Knopf) and The Suitcase in 1990 (Weidenfeld).
One of those books, Pushkin Hills, appeared in 1983 under the title Zapovednik (“The Preserve”). It has waited thirty years for its publication in English in this brilliant translation by the writer’s daughter, Katherine Dovlatov. Like all of Dovlatov’s work, it has charm, bite, vitality, and a peculiar sweetness. The book is narrated by an authorial alter ego, Boris Alikhanov, a youngish, unpublished writer with a drinking problem, who is spending the summer as a guide at Pushkin’s house and estate near Pskov. In The Zone, his book about his experiences as a prison guard, Dovlatov wrote that he deliberately refrained from writing about “the wildest, bloodiest, most monstrous episodes of camp life” – partly for moral and aesthetic reasons and partly because, he added mordantly, he did not want to be known as a Shalamov or Solzhenitsyn, writers best-known for their chilling descriptions of Gulag life. “I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through hell (however much I may love Shalamov). It’s enough that I worked as a guide on the Pushkin estate.” [163] In that book, Dovlatov argued that a Soviet camp was Soviet society in a microcosm, and one of the teasing pleasures of Pushkin Hills is the jokey way he treats the Pushkin estate as both a benign prison camp and another microcosmic analogue of Soviet reality – complete with ambitious apparatchiks, loyal ideologues, ornery peasants, loathsome snitches, and dissident intellectuals (i.e. Dovlatov himself, in the guise of Boris Alikhanov). Of course, because this is the benign, literary version, the apparatchiks and ideologues are all Pushkin devotees who cannot countenance anything but utter devotion to the literary idol. Marianna Petrovna, whose job at the estate is the daunting-sounding “methodologist,” gives Boris the once-over:
“Do you love Pushkin?”
I felt a muffled irritation.
“I do.”
At this rate, I thought, it won’t be long before I don’t.
“And may I ask you why?”…
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why do you love Pushkin?”
“Let’s stop this idiotic test,” I burst out. [24]
There are the familiar Dovlatov portraits, full of tender comedy: Mitrofanov, for instance, a guide famous for his photographic memory, who has read ten thousand books, but who has become incurably lazy. He suffers, says Dovlatov, from aboulia, or “total atrophy of the will”: “He was a phenomenon that belonged to the vegetable kingdom, a bright, fanciful flower. A chrysanthemum cannot hoe its own soil and water itself.” [48] Strangely, life at the Pushkin preserve suits Mitrofanov, and he delivers fanatically detailed and scholarly lectures to largely ungrateful tourists. Or Guryanov, famous for his extraordinary ignorance, who once confused Pushkin’s Tales of Ivan Belkin with what he absurdly called “The tale of Ivan Onegin”…[124] Or Mikhail Ivanych Sorokin, the rustic alcoholic in whose revoltingly neglected hovel Boris rents a room for the season, and who wants to be paid not in cash but in booze and cigarettes.
Like everything Dovlatov wrote, Pushkin Hills is funny on every page, sparkling with jokes, repartee, and this writer’s special savage levity. But Dovlatov is also expert at what Gogol called “laughter through tears.” In Pushkin Hills, the almost Wodehouse-like escapades in the countryside are constantly menaced by the obligations and difficulties Boris has fled – how to be a writer in the Soviet Union, how to live amicably with his wife and daughter. “Officially, I was a full-fledged creative personality. In reality, I was on the edge of a mental breakdown.” [79] These anxieties present themselves in concentrated form when Boris’s wife, Tanya, begins to force the question of emigration. On a surprise visit to the Pushkin estate, she tells Boris that she has made the decision: she will file emigration papers next week. Boris is fearful, irrational, resistant. He refuses to leave the Soviet Union. He loves his country – “My language, my people, my crazy country…Imagine this, I even love the policemen.” [86] Emigration seems like death to him; he tells Tanya that in a foreign tongue “we lose eighty percent of our personality.” [87] America seems merely fictional, chimerical: “A half-forgotten film starring Akbar the tiger and Charlie Chaplin…” [88]
Boris seems to anticipate the émigré life that Dovlatov would write about three years later in A Foreign Woman, a book which, like Pushkin Hills, is full of jollity and tremulous sadness. In that later book several of the characters struggle to adapt to life in New York – people like Karavayev, for instance, known in the Soviet Union as a brave human rights activist (imprisoned three times and a serial hunger striker). America, writes Dovlatov, had “disappointed” Karavayev: “He missed the Soviet regime, Marxism, and the punitive organs. Karavayev had nothing to protest against.” [10] The heroine of A Foreign Woman, Marusya Tatarovich, decides that she has made a mistake in leaving Russia and applies to return. Dovlatov (who appears as himself in this book) asks her about the prospect of losing her newfound freedom. “To hell with freedom! I want peace!” Raised in relative privilege in the Soviet Union, she has feeble economic prospects in New York: “Wash dishes in a lousy restaurant? Study computers? Sell chestnuts on 108th Street? I’d rather go back.” [82] At the Soviet embassy, she is told that it is all very well to confess in private to having made a mistake, but if she wants to return she must now “earn forgiveness.” (A political, nicely comic version of Dostoevsky’s idea that the criminal must religiously “accept his suffering.”) Marusya is told she will have to write a newspaper article laying out her errors as public atonement. But she can’t write journalism, she says. Who will pen the piece? “I’ll get Dovlatov to write it.” Needless to say, the article remains unwritten; for better or worse, Marusya stays in America.
In its sly, sidelong, defiantly non-aligned way, Dovlatov’s work is always probing questions of freedom. Boris, in Pus
hkin Hills, perhaps belongs on a spectrum with Karavayev and Marusya Tatarovich in A Foreign Woman and in The Zone, Chichevanov, a prisoner who escapes from camp just hours before his legitimate release – after twenty years inside, he is so afraid of freedom that he wants only to be recaptured. “Outside the prison gates,” says one of the officers, Chichevanov “would have had nothing to do. He was wildly afraid of freedom, he was gasping for breath like a fish.” And Dovlatov adds: “There’s something similar in what we Russian émigrés experience.” [88]
It’s not simply that freedom might be frightening, novel, unreal; it’s that it might turn out to be not as free as advertised – or not free in exactly the way promised. And if you refuse to risk the potential “disappointment” of freedom by exercising it, you will, at least, avoid that disappointment. It’s why Boris fearfully defends, even to the point of absurdity, his non-existent status as Russian writer: when Tanya reminds him that he hasn’t been (and, seemingly, can’t be) published in the Soviet Union, he replies, “But my readers are here. While over there…Who needs my stories in Chicago?” [87] Better, perhaps, to have always-unrealized potential than lapsed actuality. Shadowing Boris, and indeed all of Dovlatov’s émigrés, is the double sense of freedom, both positive and negative, that V.S. Naipaul beautifully evokes at the end of his story “One out of Many,” from In a Free State. The story is about Santosh, a poor servant from Bombay who accompanies his master, a diplomat, to Washington, D.C. Santosh is utterly lost in America, but he eventually marries an African-American woman and thus gains the right to stay. His new employer, who owns an Indian restaurant, reassures him that in the States no one cares, as they would in India, that Santosh is married to a black woman: “Nobody looks at you when you walk down the street. Nobody cares what you do.” And Santosh comments: “He was right. I was a free man; I could do anything I wanted…It didn’t matter what I did, because I was alone.” It is an enormous privilege to live in a country where “nobody cares what you do”; but when nobody cares what you do, then perhaps it doesn’t matter what you do. Perhaps apprehending something like this, Boris falters and freezes; it is easier to make no decision at all. He lets his wife and daughter go ahead of him.
Freedom is both actual and ideal, both concrete and metaphysical. There are enacted realities, like the rule of law, free speech, economic possibility and limitation, material circumstance – it should go without saying that these actualities are of enormous consequence in immigrants’ lives. But the émigré has also a strange, pure, almost metaphysical liberty: this, as Nabokov knew, is the portable, remembered world he or she brings with him from the old country. Nabokov’s émigré professor, Timofey Pnin, knows this portable, internal, untouchable, undisappointable world to be the cosmos you carry inside you – the stories, the people, the memories, the anecdotes and jokes, even the very dates of one’s national history; in short, the émigré’s entire cultural formation: “a brilliant cosmos that seemed all the fresher for having been abolished by one blow of history,” as Pnin thinks of it. It is why Dovlatov is able to look at the single suitcase he brought with him from the Soviet Union and disdain the things inside it (the hat, the jacket, the shirt, the gloves). The things are not important. What are important are the stories these things drag with them, the very stories Dovlatov made into his book, The Suitcase, the stories that enliven every page of his writing. In this sense, things are not concrete; the impalpable stories are, made so by the great writer when set down brilliantly, vividly in print for generations of future readers. I don’t know if Boris quite understands this, at the end of Pushkin Hills; but we are very fortunate that Sergei Dovlatov did.
—James Wood
Notes
p. 7, Gordin, Shchegolev, Tsyavlovskaya… Kern’s memoirs: Arkady Gordin (1913–97) was a Pushkin expert who wrote a number of books on Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye, where the Pushkin Preserve is now located. Pavel Shchegolev (1877–1931) and Tatyana Tsyavlovskaya (1897–1978) were also noted Pushkin specialists. Anna Kern (1800–79) was briefly Pushkin’s lover. The two met in nearby Trigorskoye in 1825.
p. 8, Alexei Vulf’s Diaries: Alexei Nikolayevich Vulf (1805–81) was a bon vivant and close friend of Pushkin.
p. 8, Ryleyev’s mother: Kondraty Ryleyev (1795–1826) was a leader in the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, which sought to overthrow the Tsar, and a publisher of Pushkin’s work.
p. 13, Hannibal… Zakomelsky: Ibrahim Hannibal (1696–1781) was Pushkin’s great-grandfather, an African (probably from modern-day Eritrea) who was kidnapped as a child and given as a gift to the Russian tsar, later becoming a high-ranking favourite of Peter the Great. Pushkin wrote an unfinished novel, The Negro of Peter the Great, on the subject of Hannibal. There is a famous painting that was traditionally thought to depict Hannibal, though some scholars have argued that the medal depicted in the painting was an order not created until after Hannibal’s death. Baron Ivan Mellor–Zakomelsky (1725–90), the putative subject of the painting, was a high-ranking general who served in the Second Russo-Turkish War.
p. 15, The Bronze Horseman: Pushkin’s 1833 narrative poem which takes its title from a statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg.
p. 17, Likhonosov: Viktor Likhonosov (1936–) was closely associated with the “Village Prose” literary movement of the Sixties that focused on rural life in the Soviet Union and often presented a nostalgic or idealized view of Russia.
p. 18, Mandelstam: Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), Russian poet and essayist.
p. 19, the writer Volin’s work: Probably Vladimir Volin (1924–98), writer and journalist who worked for a variety of Soviet magazines and journals.
p. 20, Gleb Romanov… in Bucharest: Gleb Romanov (1920–67) was a popular actor and performer. Ruzhena Sikora (1918–2006) was a well-known Soviet singer of Czech origin. “This song for two soldi” is a line from the song ‘Una canzone da due soldi’ by the Italian singer Achille Togliani (1924–95). ‘I Daydreamt of You in Bucharest’ was a Russian song from the Fifties performed by Sidi Tal (1912–83), a Jewish singer popular in the Soviet Union.
p. 23, The sacred path will not be overgrown: A deliberate distortion of Pushkin’s famous poem ‘Exegi monumentum’: “the people’s path will not be overgrown”. Dovlatov famously attempted never to have two words in one sentence begin with the same letter – Pushkin’s text “ne zarastyot narodnaya tropa” has two Ns.
p. 27, Agdam: An Azeri fortified white wine.
p. 30, the Order of the Red Star: A decoration given for exceptional military bravery, or for long service in the armed forces.
p. 31, Gagarin: Yuri Gagarin (1934–68), Soviet cosmonaut and the first human to travel into outer space.
p. 34, The Decembrist uprising: The failed attempt to overthrow the Tsar in 1825, directly supported by many of Pushkin’s close friends.
p. 34, Benois: Alexandre Benois (1870–1960) was a Russian artist who worked extensively with the Ballets Russes and Sergei Diaghilev.
p. 36, Yesenin… Pasternak: Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925), a Russian lyrical poet who committed suicide at the age of thirty. His works were widely celebrated, but many were banned by the authorities. The poet and novelist Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) suffered enormously at the hands of the authorities, especially after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 for the novel Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in the Soviet Union.
p. 36, Solzhenitsyn’s: Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1914–2008), dissident writer and activist.
p. 38, the famous drawing by Bruni: In 1837, Fyodor Bruni (1799–1875) sketched Pushkin on his deathbed.
p. 38, the secret removal and funeral… Alexander Turgenev: Alexander Turgenev (1784–1846), a close friend of Pushkin’s, transported the poet’s body to the family vault in Svyatogorsky Monastery, near Mikhailovskoye.
p. 39, Kramskoy’s Portrait of a Woman on the wall: Ivan Kramskoy (1837–87), Russian painter and critic.
p. 40, Intercession: The Intercession of the Theotokos, a holy day in the Russia
n Orthodox Church, celebrated on 1st October.
p. 42, 1917… Makhno: Nestor (or Bat’ko, a diminutive of the word “father”) Makhno (1888–1934) was a Ukrainian anarchist who fought against both the Whites and Reds in the Russian Civil War. Although Makhno escaped the Cheka (the Soviet secret police) after the Bolsheviks consolidated their power, many of his followers were shot.
p. 42, What was the duel between Pushkin and Lermontov about?: Pushkin and Lermontov, the best-known poets of nineteenth-century Russia, both died famously in duels, but not with one another. It is believed they never even met.
p. 42, Pikul, Rozhdestvensky, Meylakh… Novikov: Valentin Savvich Pikul (1928–90) was a writer of popular historical novels. Robert Ivanovich Rozhdestvensky (1932–94) was a lyrical poet. Boris Solomonovich Meylakh (1909–87) was a literary critic who specialized in Pushkin. Ivan Alexeyevich Novikov (1877–1959) was a prolific author who wrote several works on Pushkin.
p. 43, Benckendorff: Alexander von Benckendorff (c.1782–1844) was a Russian commander and later directly monitored and censored Pushkin’s correspondence and literary work.
p. 44, Arina Rodionovna… Seryakov: Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva (1758–1828) was Pushkin’s nanny. Yakov Seryakov (1818–69) was a sculptor.
p. 44, a Finnish knife flashed ominously: Another reference from Yesenin’s ‘Letter to Mother’ (1924).
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