Sergei Dovlatov

Born in Ufa in 1941 during the wartime evacuation and raised in Leningrad, Dovlatov served in the Soviet army as a guard in the prison camp system of the Komi region, an experience that became his novel The Zone, and worked afterward as a journalist, including several years in Tallinn, Estonia.

Repeatedly blocked at home from publishing fiction that Soviet censors found ideologically weightless rather than dangerous, he emigrated in 1978 and eventually settled in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, at the center of New York's Russian émigré community, where he co-founded and edited a Russian-language émigré newspaper.

He became, alongside Nabokov, one of only two Russian-born writers regularly published in The New Yorker during his lifetime. Alcoholism shadowed him for decades, and he died of heart failure in New York in 1990 at forty-eight, just as wider American recognition was finally arriving.