Roma Liberov. Napisano Sergeem Dovlatovym 14 July 2023

WE ALL HAVE OUR OWN DOVLATOV

"In the struggle against absurdity, this is the way to act. The reaction should be just as absurd."

Sergei Dovlatov

Sergei Dovlatov was a Russian writer and journalist. None of his significant works were published in the USSR during his lifetime; he was known exclusively through samizdat. In 1978, his persecution, impossibility of work and lack of livelihood led him to emigrate first to Vienna and then to the United States, where his work was published. He died on August 24, 1990, in New York, the same day he left the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s he became the second Russian writer, after Vladimir Nabokov, to be published in The New Yorker.

"Everyone wonders what happens after death? After death, history begins," Dovlatov wrote in his Notebooks.

Dovlatov was not published in the Soviet Union. He had 14 books published in America. Yet the true "history" of the writer Dovlatov, in a paradoxical, i.e. fully Dovlatovian, began not in America but in Russia, where people began to read his books by storm in the 1990s, after the writer's death.

"I don't really care that much about the biographical circumstances of anyone I love or about whom I do anything at all. I take it this way: everything that was really important to Dovlatov from what happened to him, from the biographical details, from the worldview shifts - everything that was really important is in the plane of the text."

Roma Liberov about the film "Written by Sergei Dovlatov

ROMA LIBEROV

Russian film director, scriptwriter, producer. Since 2009 he has been working on a series of films in memory of Russian writers, in which he uses non-fiction and staged footage, animation, puppet and shadow theatre, installations, computer graphics, etc. The director's visual language conveys the literary style of the writers about whom the film is made. Journalists call this style quasi-documentary cinema. He attracted actors to the project: Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Valentin Gaft, Inna Churikova, Sergey Makovetsky, Viktor Sukhorukov, Chulpan Khamatova, Sergey Puskepalis and others.