THE IMAGE OF A RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL IN IMMIGRATION IN THE WORK OF S. DOVLATOV

Abstract

The primary meaning of a work of art is the personality of the author. Especially if it uses autobiographical material. Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990) is a special case in this respect. Just as in the mysterious drawing by Maurice Escher two hands draw each other, the writer Dovlatov and the character Dovlatov are interdependent. Which does not mean they are the same. Those who knew him from books seemed to know him. Those who knew him in life understood that they knew him little. A great hoaxer, he knew how to bring the surrounding reality into an unstable state. All the facts in his biography are inaccurate, ambiguous, unclear. This should be remembered when reading his books - almost confessional in form, but mostly fictional in content. In the gravitational field around Dovlatov, reality is distorted, losing its authenticity. However, before getting personal, it would be good to understand the criteria. Humanistic pathos, characteristic of all world literature, can be called the justification of man. How is a person judged by people? The scale for assessing the social significance of each of us is located between two generalizing definitions: a big man and a small man. The megalomania inherent in Russian sovereignty recognized only statesmen as great people. So the tsarist censor was outraged by the inappropriate respect for the personality of Pushkin, expressed in his obituary: what importance can there be in a poet - especially such that he did not glorify sovereign power, but called for mercy for the fallen. It was on the question of the place of man in Russian reality that the state and society diverged in the most decisive way. Russian literature turned its face away from the mighty of this world and turned its heart to poor people, the poor, the unfortunate. Outsiders, seen through the magic crystal of art, turn out to be real people, and the masters of life - existential impostors. The end-to-end character of Dovlatov's prose, the author's alter ego, is a little man... in a country made up of dwarfs. This is the first surprise that confuses our minds: a big little man. It is generally accepted that the main pathos of Dovlatov's work is condescension to human weakness.