Sergei Dovlatov, the Soviet Philip Roth

Sergei Dovlatov’s first book was originally published in the United States in 1978 and promptly led Soviet authorities to allow him to leave for the West, where he became briefly famous, edited a Jewish émigré newspaper, and died despondent, unable to write after years of productivity. Out in a new paperback edition this winter, The Invisible Book, made visible the key features of his prose: laconic style, unabashed interest in the self, and an understated and deep interest in moral life.

The Invisible Book contains, among other things, Dovlatov’s actual review of a performance in Tallinn, where he was working as a journalist, by the pianist Oscar Peterson, “the unsurpassed jazz improviser.” Dovlatov loved jazz, as practically did everyone in his cohort in Leningrad in the early 1960s. They loved it because it was American, free, and grounded in improvisation—the very antithesis of the Soviet reality around them. “It’s hard to write about jazz,” Dovlatov notes. “I could talk about Peterson’s use of diatonic and chromatic sequences and polytonal chords; I could talk about the harmonious relationship between the tonic and the sub-dominant, or I could comment on the various relationships between higher mathematics and jazz … but what for?” He could, but more important is Peterson’s “solitary, trembling, tormenting note in the silence …” The punch line comes when Peterson “solemnly” shakes Dovlatov’s hand and exclaims, “This is some kind of record! It’s the first time I’ve been written in such small type!”

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From Tablet Magazine