how to turn emigration into literature

45 years ago, on February 22, 1979, Sergei Dovlatov arrived in the United States. Although recognition among his acquaintances and samizdat readers came to him in the Soviet Union, his literary career truly began in America. It was not a matter of finally being able to publish stories and novellas. Rather, the fact is that Dovlatov was able to successfully convert internal emigration into external emigration. This maneuver was carried out in different ways by many of his friends – Joseph Brodsky, Eduard Limonov, but Dovlatov’s case is special.

Text: Igor Gulin

Dovlatov was an American fan all his life, he loved jazz, Hollywood, Disney, which, of course, was not uncommon among Soviet nonconformists and simply fashionistas. Another thing is more important: he was probably the most American among Soviet writers – both in the underground and in printed literature. The structure of his works, the manner of narration, the character of the characters – sardonic irony, vulnerable brutality, reliance on anecdote as the structural basis of prose, oscillation between extreme accessibility and easy elitism (what decades later will be called the word “no-brau”), all this is American style. More precisely, the style of the “Soviet American canon”: from O. Henry to Updike, with the indispensable Hemingway in the center.

Dovlatov has a tiny early story, “Emigrants”: two intellectuals meet at a screening of a Tarkovsky film, punch each other in the face, fraternize, get drunk, and in the morning they find themselves in God knows where. Having asked a passerby what kind of place this is, and having received the answer “New Holland”, they decide that they have inadvertently ended up in the West, and begin to admire ordinary Soviet Leningrad as a coveted vicious foreign country. This is a grotesque self-description of the principle of Dovlatov’s early prose. Its engine is the ability to shift reality a little “to the west” and at the same time the knowledge that this is a game, a show of style.

Among the characters of cultural Leningrad of the 1960s in this role of “our foreigner,” Dovlatov turned out to be Brodsky’s comic younger brother. However, this relationship is more complex: partly it was Dovlatov who invented and mythologized Brodsky as an otherworldly genius – his own sublime double (one can recall at least the classic story from “The Craft” about how Brodsky mistakes the festive portrait of the first secretary of the Georgian Central Committee of the CPSU Vasily Mzhavanadze for the image of William Blake ). Both of them lived in a kind of romantic dual world – Soviet and non-Soviet space at the same time. In a note in memory of Dovlatov, Brodsky writes this: we were Americans, meaning individualism, contempt for collectivist ethics, the symbol of which was the generalized American aesthetics. Like all romanticism, such a worldview requires ups and downs, charm and disappointment. Help here is alcohol, the dynamics of intoxication and hangover. And Dovlatov’s well-known alcoholism was not a simple vice, but an important part of his writing toolkit.

Literary America appears here not only as a magical kingdom of freedom, but even more – as a starting point, a source of a different view of existing reality. There really isn’t much fun in this look. Therefore, unlike many emigrant writers, Dovlatov was not particularly disappointed when he finally found himself abroad. Frustration was already an innate part of his optics. The hero of American prose – wandering the streets of New York, rushing along the highway, ordering one whiskey after another – was supposed to experience melancholy, smile bitterly. Dovlatov learned this literary facial expression long before leaving, and he did not have to relearn it while emigrating. But from a distance, the key operation of his work with Soviet reality was easier to carry out.

As befits an anti-Soviet writer, Dovlatov described in his main books what we would now call disciplinary spaces. This is a university, an army, a zone, an editorial office, a museum, a family. In the dying, most poignant story, “Branch,” it turns out that the same space of unfreedom, painful suppression of personality is love. What is at work here is not social criticism, but existentialism—also very Sixties. Unfreedom in Dovlatov’s books is opposed not by dignity, not by proud resistance, but by misunderstanding. The power of chaos always breaks order, and this power is allied with literature. (“Everything needs a dose of absurdity,” Dovlatov’s heroes like to repeat.)

“The Suitcase,” the book in which Dovlatov for the first time directly touches on the emigrant experience, is structured like this: pants, a hat, a belt and other items taken from the Union to America act as evidence-souvenirs of delusional cases. The dotted line of misunderstandings forms a biography. Emigration in Dovlatov’s later books is not an escape from unfreedom to freedom (he always mocked the apologists of this rhetoric). This is the reassembly point.

The prisoner, as always happens, takes the prison with him. But this prison is also his kingdom, and he is its prince. He is a prince not because he is handsome, noble, or smart, but only because he knows how to perceive humiliation as material for literature and thus rise above reality. All the junk that he took with him – his regalia, all the idiotic stories – a chronicle of his exploits.

Emigration adds to the gap in self-awareness – an external gap. If writing, according to Dovlatov, is citizenship in an imaginary America, then real America is the best place to turn a past and almost finished life into literature. Not so much a place on the map, a country with its own rules and morals, charms and abominations, but rather a materialized metaphor. (Therefore, existence in it is somewhat surreal; the Russians who left, the characters of his novels and short stories of the 1980s, seem to live in a half-asleep, trying as actively as possible to ignore the surrounding foreign culture.)

The secret of the appeal of Dovlatov’s prose is that it gives the reader a recipe for a comforting look at the worthlessness of one’s own life. Ordinary experience appears as an exceptional experience, external lack of freedom – as an opportunity to affirm internal freedom through irony, any failure – as something that has already received compositional completeness, framed in history, and therefore – a victory, at least in the space of literature. To write like this, you need to find a very precise, verified distance between reality and the text, and it was the experience of emigration that, it seems, allowed Dovlatov to do this.

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