Sergey Dovlatov (1941-1990) was a Russian short-story writer and novelist.

Dovlatov was born in 1941 in Ufa, Russia, where his family had been evacuated during World War II. After 1945 he lived with his family in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Dovlatov studied at the philological department of Leningrad State University, but flanked after two and a half years. He served in the Red Army in convoys of strict security prison camps. Later, he earned his living as a journalist correspondent of the Tallinn newspaper "The Soviet Estonia". He supplemented this income with another job as a tourist guide in Pushkin museum near Pskov. Dovlatov wrote prose, but his numerous attempts to be printed in the Soviet magazines were in vain . The set of his first book was destroyed under the order of the KGB. In 1976, some stories of Dovlatov had been published in the Western magazines, including "Continent", Time, and We, resulting in his expulsion from the Union of journalists of the USSR.

In 1978 Dovlatov emigrated from Soviet Union, came with his family to New York where he later coedited "The New American", a liberal, Russian-language immigrant newspaper. In the mid 80's, Dovlatov finally achieved his greatest success as a writer, being printed in the prestigious magazine "the New Yorker". Dovlatov died in August 24, 1990 in New York and was buried in the "Mount Hebron" cemetery.

Sergey Dovlatov issued twelve books in the USA and Europe during his twelve years as an emigrant. In the Soviet Union, the writer was known from Samizdat and Radio Liberty. After his death and the fall of the Soviet Union, numerous collections of his short stories were finally published in Russia.

Quotes: "I want to be alike only to Chekhov".

External links

• http://cs.smith.edu/~aloutsen/Dovlatov.html
  
• http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/detail.asp?art_id=236
  
• http://dowlatow.chkebelski.de/index_e.html