We Met, We Talked: Stories

We present an anthology of Sergei Dovlatov’s early short stories—most of them written in the 1980s. Literally after only a few of his first texts, Dovlatov’s writing style became “Dovlatov-like”—with his recognizable humor, irony, paradoxicality, and absurdity, masterfully blended with depictions of everyday life.

The heroes of Dovlatov’s stories—an emigrated loser Golovker and flight attendant Lida, Major Kuzmenko and director Malinovsky, a young married couple and a student working odd jobs… The social slice isn’t that important, because “one person to another is a friend; they met—then talked.” More precisely—tried to talk. But the 1980s were a time of breaking connections and losing internal direction. And the conversation between the characters only wants to happen, but it doesn’t. The characters of the stories only try to find their place in an absurd reality, but they don’t. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the USSR or America. What helps people survive this absurd, fading reality is only a sense of humor and relentless self-reflection.

“I always thought that with his gigantic height, his relationship with our down-to-earth blond reality must have formed in a rather peculiar way. The feeling of an absurdly paradoxical edge of everything that happens—both outside and inside his consciousness—is inherent in practically everything that came out of his pen.”

Joseph Brodsky

Contents:

1. “Met, talked” (Yefim Shifrin)
2. “A Road to a New Apartment” (Dina Rubina)
3. “The Role” (Maksim Sukhanov)
4. “The Grape” (Maksim Sukhanov)
5. “On the Street and at Home” (Maksim Sukhanov)
6. “A Third Turn Left” (Igor Mirkurbánov)
7. “We and the gynecologist Budanitsky” (Aleksei Bagdasarov)
8. “Ariel” (Aleksei Bagdasarov)
9. “A Toy” (Aleksei Bagdasarov)
10. “Life is short” (Ivan Litvinov)
11. “An old rooster, baked in clay” (Dmitry Kreminsky)