Pushkin Hills

Starred review from December 9, 2013
In Dovlatov’s posthumously translated short novel, Boris Alikhanov, a frustrated writer, recently divorced and low on money, takes up a menial tour-guide position at the Pushkin Hills Preserve. Feeling he’s entitled to a better life because of his self-ascribed literary brilliance, and the nagging thought that he picked up the pen for a reason, he spends much of his time mentally lampooning the people he meets and their undying devotion to Pushkin. Narrated in the first person, Alikhanov’s hilarious observations of the community and people around him (“He was too lazy to put on a hat. He simply laid it on top of his head”), his alcoholic misadventures, and especially his ridicule of the Pushkin Hills Preserve tourists propel this comic but trenchant story. Along the way, he recounts, in his deadpan voice, numerous anecdotes, ruminates on the failings of his writer contemporaries, and falls in love. The novel, however, is not without heart, and the moving final act prevents the book from becoming one-note. A most satisfying read that sustains its humor and emotional resonance.

Starred review from February 15, 2014
Soviet emigre Dovlatov died in New York in 1990, and since then, his reputation in America, bolstered late in life by the New Yorker and by fans, including Kurt Vonnegut, has faded. With luck, that reputation will be restored and enhanced by the first English publication (with a lively, playful translation by his daughter Katherine) of this brief, fabulous, partly autobiographical 1983 novel. Hard-drinking Boris Alikhanov, unable to win publication approval from the authorities and set adrift by his ex-wife and their daughter in Leningrad, repairs to the countryside and takes a ridiculous but appealing summer gig as a literary tour guide at the Pushkin estate. There, he encounters a marvelous gallery of rogues, washouts and eccentrics like himself, exemplars of the 19th-century Russian type known as the "superfluous man"--smart, alienated, determined wastrels of their so-called potential. For a time, he seems to regain a grip on his life in this weird, intermittently hilarious rural idyll, but after his ex-wife comes to visit and asks him to sign a form permitting their daughter to emigrate with her to the West, Boris embarks on an epic bender. The portrait of Boris that emerges is of a man who seems most pitiable in that he asks no pity, offers no face-saving excuses, can't even muster the small consolation of self-delusion. He's simply stuck: "Any decisive step imposes responsibility. So let others be held responsible. Inactivity is the only moral condition." Told mainly in barbed, surprising dialogue--Dovlatov's trademark technical flourish was never to have two words in any sentence begin with the same letter, and the result here is a breezy, angular, associative style that seems almost Grace Paley-ish--this is an odd, dark, idiosyncratic little dazzler. A black comedy of eyes-wide-open excess in the vein of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes or David Gates' Jernigan. And a fine rumination on being Russian, besides.

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February 15, 2014
If comedy is tragedy plus time, Dovlatov's deliriously acerbic Pushkin Hills invites an apothegm of its own, Russian comedy is tragedy plus alcohol. After divorcing his wife and abandoning his daughter, Boris Alikhanovfailed writer, successful drunkleaves Leningrad in the hopes of drying out or at least escaping his shame. He flees to the Pushkin Hills Preserve, a sort of nostalgia theme park, where he ekes out a living giving tours. His wife appears, announces her intent to emigrate with their daughter, and invites Boris to accompany them. Having gotten to know Boris and his merry band of drunks, yokels, and Pushkin groupies, we know how it will end. Dovlatov himself held a job at Pushkin Hills and died in New York in 1990 at age 48. This is the sixth of his books released in English, and the translation by his daughter is a marvel, studded with puns and witty banter. If addiction might be dignified as necessity, Dovlatov, through Boris, has made of necessity a virtue. This is brief, sketchy, episodic, hilariousin a word, delightful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)