Dovlatov's daughter

(Photo: Valery Plotnikov )

Katya arrived in Prague, and we made an appointment at the monument to St. Wenceslas, like everyone else in the city. Here it’s called “at the horse’s side.” Katya is slender and tall, especially at these buskins. She cut her hair shorter than she always wore it - unusual. Every time you wonder - are you more like your father? More. Normal - age. Although she has an oblong eye shape - from her beautiful mother. Everything else is Dovlatov: lips, facial expressions, gestures. Especially suddenly one gesture, it is unclear where it came from.

Dovlatov had bad teeth, like almost every Russian citizen by the age of forty. In New York, he put in what was needed: without vulgar snow-whiteness, natural ivory. But before that he was embarrassed to open his mouth wide and laughed, hiding behind his palm. Where did Katya, with her teeth all right, get this temporary Dovlatov manner: smiling or giggling, bringing her palm to her mouth?

Dovlatov rarely laughed openly, I don’t remember laughing - more often he just giggled. I once showed him a page from Dostoevsky’s “Teenager” about how laughter is the truest indicator of human nature, he even pouted, knowing this way of laughing. It was gloating in him, or something: not specifically, but in general about the imperfection of the crown of creation.

I’ve known Katya since she was twelve: I met Lena and her a year before Sergei arrived in the States. The last time Katya and I saw each other was two years ago in St. Petersburg, at the Dovlatov conference, when she asked me dozens of questions about my father. And then suddenly I found myself in London, where I was studying Russian literature: my dad was also in the program. Some strange wide parabola threw her, already an adult, into literature for which her father lived. I remember Dovlatov’s standard emigrant despair: “She doesn’t read anything! Even if it’s not in Russian, but it’s nothing at all! I listened from the kitchen for half an hour as her company communicated on TV. Do you like it? - Yes, I like it. - Are you sure? - Yes, I’m sure. And so for half an hour, can you imagine?”

From time to time, I receive a message from Katya by email: urgently tell me something about Venedikt Erofeev that is not in the books, I have a test tomorrow. Katya's computer is without localization, and zachiot looks even more alarming.

In our Prague apartment, we prepared a Japanese dinner with eight hands: my wife and I, and Katya and her cousin Yulia, the daughter of the legendary “older brother,” Boris Dovlatov, whom I had never met. Boris died from the same thing as Sergei, in the same year, only a little later. The main thing is not to dry out the sushi rice. “But it’s true that dad didn’t care what he ate?” Exactly. Hungry, he carnivorously dreamed of “fried eggs drowning in fat” - this is the limit. Not exactly the classic Russian superiority complex over the bottom. Only literature was on top. Where below was jazz, even below cinema. Everything else lay at the bottom along with cooking - theater, painting, classical music.

One of Dovlatov’s favorite books was Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” - about how the hero consistently and fiercely frees himself from all his social, moral, aesthetic roles, leaving only himself as a writer. “Like cabbage leaves from a stalk,” said Dovlatov. He was not given such self-denial, but the ideal was preserved.

Dovlatov wanted to be a writer and only a writer, for this purpose he moved from St. Petersburg to Tallinn and further to the States, and became a writer, so much so that in the ten years that have passed since August 24, 1990, he finally turned into four white volumes, into a concept, a monument, a hieroglyph of culture. I notice that I have trained myself to smartly answer the question: is it true what Dovlatov wrote about me? I say it’s not true, but I completely agree with this lie. This is already an attitude towards the classics, and the monument and the person are inversely proportional. Unless you go out to the horse and see Dovlatov’s daughter Katya smiling and suddenly covering her mouth with her palm.


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Dovlatov wanted to be a writer and became a writer, so much so that in the ten years that have passed since August 24, 1990, he finally turned into four white volumes, into a concept, into a monument, into a hieroglyph of culture...