The Suitcase

Sergey Dovlatov as a writer developed in Leningrad, but success came to him in America, where he had lived since 1979. His artistic thinking, despite the outward paradox supported by life experience, is simple and noble: to tell how strange people live—sometimes sadly laughing, sometimes comically grieving. There are no righteous people in his books, because there are no villains either. The writer knows: heaven and hell are inside us.

Dovlatov believed in only one thing—“the smile of reason.” This worthy, restrained position brought Sergey Dovlatov broad recognition at the end of the second millennium. His prose has been staged, filmed, studied in schools and universities, and translated into major European languages and Japanese… Sergey Dovlatov said that he would only want to be like Chekhov. Well, by remaining himself, more than anyone else from his literary generation, he looks like a Russian classic today.