Three cities in Sergey Dovlatov. Aryev A.

The literary fate of Sergei Dovlatov was determined, according to him, three cities: Leningrad, Tallinn and New York. In the first of them, he condemned himself to a writer's fate, in the second he hoped to affirm himself in a writing rank, in the third he achieved recognition, a reverse wave of his book to the fatherly shores. All three cities are an inexhaustible storehouse of plots with which the whole life of their author, an outstanding creator, with an artistic brilliance told about our everyday, but complete absurd situations, existence, is braided. In each of these cities there were friends, to whom the talent of Sergei Dovlatov seemed unconditional from the day of acquaintance at the time, when he was still known to anyone. Their thoughts and memories of the departed friend are important for those who read Dovlatov’s prose, which became classical before our eyes. Three different cities, three different, aesthetically dissimilar, but ethically close to each other, the writer Andrei Aryev, Elena Skulskaya, Alexander Genis came together under the same cover to capture the three -dimensional image of Sergei Dovlatov on the map of domestic literature.