In the collection "The Splendor and Poverty of Russian Literature," Sergey Dovlatov’s philological prose is presented in fairly complete form for the first time. He wrote about Pushkin and Tolstoy, V. Uflyand and A. Sinyavsky, Kafka and Hemingway (as "Russian" and personal authors).
Dovlatov’s reviews, routine magazine hackwork, turn into literary portraits or sketches of literary manners, and intersect with the same "literature about literature" as "Invisible Book" or "Solo on the IBM Selectric."
Dovlatov’s philological prose is defined not by objectivity, but by a personal tone, caustic wit, and humor — the same qualities characteristic of his "ordinary" prose.
For the first time, Dovlatov’s texts are accompanied by a real commentary by Professor I. N. Sukhikh, Doctor of Philology.