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 The book is narrated by an authorial alter ego, Boris Alikhanov, a youngish, unpublished writer with a drinking problem, who is spending the summer as a guide at Pushkin’s house and estate near Pskov.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, chimericaclass="underline" “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 Pushkin 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]