Table of contents
What this thing is
Dovlatov works as a camp guard somewhere out in the tundra/taiga and greedily watches the lives of everyone around him.
Odd word to use, but I honestly don’t know how else to put it. Because he’s attentive to detail the way a writer is. I’d say almost every character here has that same greed in them - some of them just got less lucky with it.
What else is there to add?
It’s a great book, and a genuinely interesting piece of writing. It reminded me a lot of my beloved Bukowski and Hunter Thompson - I could really see that same constant chronicling of lowlifes. It’s even hard to tell who the bigger lowlife is here: the prisoners or the guards watching them.
One of my favorite bits on that theme is a short sketch about a new guard who couldn’t swear properly and was trying to either pass as one of the guys or, the other way around, come across as harder than he was. Which one day got him schooled by one of the inmates1:
Citizen Sergeant, you are incorrect. One can say yóbnulsya, yebanúlsya and nayebnúlsya. But yebnúlsya - that word, I’m sorry to say, does not exist in literary Russian…
The whole book is like that.
On paper it’s about a pretty grim subject, about people who are far from pleasant…
And yet it’s full of love for life, for freedom. Under any circumstances. Even in the tundra, even behind bars.
Another thing I find fascinating: the book reads like it was written with a bit of a “fuck it” attitude - like it just came out that way. Almost all of the manuscripts were smuggled out of the country, and some of them never made it to us at all.
But that’s not quite true: Dovlatov kept close control over the contents of the novella and checked in with his editor regularly. And that’s probably why all the “letters” that open each chapter sit so well. That light, deliberate carelessness makes me really happy.
Verdict
I honestly don’t know what else to add. It reads easily and effortlessly. There’s a lot of timeless thinking about freedom, beauty and the love of life in here. Things to feel sad about, things to laugh at, things to chew on.
If you don’t know what to read next, come on in. Don’t let the grim subject scare you off. The novella is simply about people in all their glory.
Take care of yourself and your loved ones!
Footnotes
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The joke is about stress and word formation in Russian obscenity: yóbnulsya, yebanúlsya and nayebnúlsya are all real words, while yebnúlsya isn’t. There’s no way to carry that across into English, sorry. ↩