Малкият човек в творчеството на Сергей Довлатов
Sergey Dovlatov’s vision of the small man

Author(s): Milena Dimova
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Russian Literature
Published by: ЮГОЗАПАДЕН УНИВЕРСИТЕТ »НЕОФИТ РИЛСКИ«
Keywords: Sergey Donatovich Dovlatov; Тhe Russian diaspora of New York; The small man
Summary/Abstract: Sergey Donatovich Dovlatov creates his own unique genre in which the autobiographical and artistic fiction intertwines. The author uses his own destiny as a literary material. His works are defined by the mass reader as "funny", but in depth they draw a dramatic picture of the everyday absurdities that the intellectual in Soviet Russia faces. The main pathos in them is the self-irony, which helps the lyrical hero not to fall into the ideological traps, to preserve his human dignity and not to relinquish his principles. All but invisible in his home country, Sergey Dovlatov became something of a mythical figure among the Russian diaspora of New York. Those who knew him personally realized they didn’t know him very well. The facts of his biography are all blurred, ambiguous, vague. This should be kept in mind when reading his books. Almost confessionary in form, their content is largely invented. As a great mystifier, he was able to unsettle his surroundings. In the field of gravitation surrounding Dovlatov, reality is distorted and loses its plausibility. The pathos typical of world literature can be seen as a defence of the human being. Every one of us has a scale according to which we weigh the social significance of a person. This scale runs between two generalizing definitions, namely “the great man” and “the small man”. The great small man is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, and indeed Dovlatov was something of an oxymoron himself, a huge walking contradiction

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