Dovlatov zone brief. The best books about prison and zone. Essay on literature on the topic: S. D. Dovlatov “Zone”

Sergey Dovlatov

(notes from the warden)

LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER

Dear Igor Markovich! I risk approaching you with a delicate proposal. The gist of it is this.

For three years now I have been planning to publish my camp book. And all three years - as quickly as possible.

Moreover, it was “The Zone” that I should have published before anything else. After all, this is where my ill-fated writing began.

As it turns out, finding a publisher is extremely difficult. For example, two people refused me. And I wouldn't like to hide it.

The reasons for refusal are almost standard. Here, if you want, are the main arguments:

The camp theme is exhausted. The reader is tired of endless prison memoirs. After Solzhenitsyn, the topic should be closed...

These considerations do not stand up to criticism. Of course, I am not Solzhenitsyn. Does this deprive me of the right to exist?

And our books are completely different. Solzhenitsyn describes political camps. I am a criminal. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner. I am the overseer. According to Solzhenitsyn, the camp is hell. I think that hell is ourselves...

Believe me, I am not comparing the scale of talent. Solzhenitsyn is a great writer and a huge personality. And enough of that.

Another consideration is much more convincing. The fact is that my manuscript is not a finished work.

This is a kind of diary, chaotic notes, a set of unorganized materials.

It seemed to me that in this chaos a general artistic plot could be traced. There is one lyrical hero acting there. Some unity of place and time was observed. In general, the only banal idea is declared - that the world is absurd...

The publishers were embarrassed by such a disorderly texture. They demanded more standard forms.

Then I tried to impose The Zone on them as a collection of short stories. The publishers said it was not profitable. That the public craves novels and epics.

The matter was complicated by the fact that the “Zone” arrived in parts. Before leaving, I photographed the manuscript on microfilm. My executor distributed pieces of it to several brave French women. They managed to smuggle my writings through customs cordons. The original is in the Union.

For several years I have been receiving tiny parcels from France. I'm trying to make a whole out of separate pieces. The film is damaged in places. (I don’t know where my benefactors hid it.) Some fragments have been completely lost.

Restoring a manuscript from film to paper is a painstaking task. Even in America, with its technical power, this is not easy. And by the way, it's not cheap.

To date, thirty percent have been restored.

With this letter I am sending some part of the finished text. I will send the next excerpt in a few days. You'll receive the rest in the coming weeks. Tomorrow I'll rent a photo enlarger.

Maybe we can build a complete whole out of all this. I will try to make up for some of this with my irresponsible reasoning.

The main thing is to be lenient. And, as prisoner Khamraev said, going to a wet job, with God!..

Old Kalyu Pakhapil hated the occupiers. And he loved it when they sang in chorus, he liked bitter mash and small fat children.

“Only Estonians should live in these parts,” said Pakhapil, “and no one else.” Strangers have nothing to do here...

The men listened to him, nodding their heads approvingly. Then the Germans came. They played harmonicas, sang, and treated the children to chocolate. Old Kalyu did not like all this. He was silent for a long time, then he got ready and went into the forest.

It was a dark forest that seemed impenetrable from a distance. There Pakhapil hunted, killed fish, and slept on spruce branches. In short, he lived until the Russians kicked out the invaders. And when the Germans left, Pakhapil returned. He appeared in Rakvere, where the Soviet captain awarded him a medal. The medal was decorated with four incomprehensible words, a figure and an exclamation point.

“Why does an Estonian need a medal?” – Pakhapil thought for a long time.

And yet he carefully secured it on the lapel of his Cheviot jacket. Kalyu wore this jacket only once - in Lansman's store.

So he lived and worked as a glazier. But when the Russians announced mobilization, Pakhapil disappeared again.

“Estonians should live here,” he said as he left, “but there’s no place for Vanks, Krauts and various Greenlans here!”

Pakhapil again went into the forest, only from a distance it seemed impenetrable. And again he hunted, thought, and was silent. And everything went well.

But the Russians launched a raid. The forest was filled with screams. It became crowded and Pakhapil was arrested. He was tried as a deserter, beaten and spat in his face. The captain who gave him the medal tried especially hard.

And then Pakhapil was exiled to the south, where the Kazakhs live. There he soon died. Probably from hunger and foreign land...

His son Gustav graduated from the nautical school in Tallinn, on Luise Street, and received a diploma as a radio operator.

In the evenings he sat in the Mundy Bar and said to frivolous girls:

– A real Estonian should live in Canada! In Canada, and nowhere else...

In the summer he was called up to guard duty. The training point was located at the Yosser station. Everything was done on command: sleep, lunch, conversations. They talked about vodka, about bread, about horses, about miners' earnings. Gustav hated all this and spoke only in his own way. Only in Estonian. Even with guard dogs.

In addition, when alone, he drank, and if he was disturbed, he fought. He also allowed “female incidents.” (According to political officer Khuriev.)

– How self-centered you are, Pakhapil! – the political officer cautiously reproached him.

Gustav was embarrassed, asked for a piece of paper and clumsily wrote: “Yesterday, this year, I abused an alcoholic drink. After which he dropped his soldier's dignity into the mud. I promise from now on. Private Pakhapil."

After some thought he always added:

“Please don’t refuse.”

Then money came from Aunt Reet. Pakhapil took a liter of chartreuse from the store and went to the cemetery. There, in the green twilight, crosses gleamed white. Further, on the edge of the reservoir, there was a neglected grave and next to it a plywood obelisk. Pakhapil sat heavily on a mound, drank and smoked.

“Estonians should live in Canada,” he muttered quietly to the steady hum of insects. For some reason they didn’t bite him...

Early in the morning, a nondescript officer arrived at the unit. Judging by his glasses, he is an ideological worker. A meeting was announced.

“Come into the Leningrad room,” the orderly shouted to the soldiers who were smoking near the gymnastic bars.

– We don’t hate politics! - the soldiers grumbled.

However, they came in and sat down.

“I was a thin string in the roaring concert of war,” Lieutenant Colonel Mar began.

“Poems,” Latvian Balodis drawled disappointedly...

Outside the window, the captain and the clerk were catching a pig. Friends tied a belt around her legs and tried to drag her up the ramp into the back of a truck. The pig screamed badly, the back of her head ached from her piercing cries. She fell on her belly. Her hooves slid along the manure-stained ladder. Small eyes were lost in folds of fat.

Sergeant Major Evchenko walked through the yard. He kicked the pig. Then he picked up the handle of a shovel, lying abandoned on the grass...

... “A noble tradition is developing in units of the Soviet Army,” said Lieutenant Colonel Mar.

– Soldiers and officers take patronage over the graves of fallen soldiers. They painstakingly recreate the history of the military feat. Establish contacts with the heroes’ relatives and friends. It is everyone’s duty to develop and strengthen such a tradition in every possible way. Let the spiteful critics in the world of purity trumpet about the conflict between fathers and sons. Let them inflate the legend of fictitious antagonism between them... Our youth sacredly honors the burial places of their fathers. Thus affirming the inextricable link between generations...

Composition

Dovlatov is disingenuous when he calls the stories of “The Zone” “chaotic notes”: the image of the main character turns them into chapters of a complete work. The “Zone” genre is genetically related to the “Cavalry” genre. The works are similar in that each of the stories in the cycle features a new character, considered in relationships with others and in the context of his era. Dovlatov creates a whole system of images: Gustav Pakhapil, pilot Mishchuk, corporal Petrov, prisoner Kuptsov, political officer Khuriev, captain Pavel Egorov. The author created living characters, refusing to divide characters into “bad” and “good”. Corporal Petrov, a coward and nonentity, is contrasted with Kuptsov, who remained a free person even in prison. Captain Egorov, a “stupid and vicious animal,” fell in love with graduate student Katya Lunina and discovered a capacity for care and compassion.

At the same time, individual fragments are distinguished by Dovlatov into independent micronovels and can exist separately from the cycle. Some of them are complete jokes.

Dovlatov’s short story series “Compromise” tells the story of the hero’s period of work in an Estonian newspaper. Switching to journalistic everyday life did not make Dovlatov’s prose any less sharp and fascinating. Here again the heightened sense of unfreedom that was the subject of research in the “Zone” is described. A journalist is forced to make compromises in order to publish his articles. Looking through old notes, he remembers that behind each there was a lie. The “Chronicle” of journalistic activity reveals the laws of a society in which at every step a person stumbles upon invisible prison bars. The dramatic coexists here with the comic. The true hero in this world turns out to be the “extra person” - the “irrepressible Russian degenerate”, the half-mad unemployed journalist Eric Bush. The need for compromise causes him to protest; Bush is unable to please his superiors and therefore loses his job.

The everyday life of the tragedy experienced by journalist Lida Agapova recalls the prose of Chekhov, whom Dovlatov, by his own admission, aspired to be like. An anecdotal situation underlies the story about the hero's trip to a collective farm with the task of writing a letter to Brezhnev for the milkmaid Linda Papers. The grotesqueness of the situation is aggravated by the fact that Brezhnev’s response was received before the letter was sent. The circumstances depicted here are reminiscent of Polyakov’s “Apothegeum” and Voinovich’s “Moscow 2042”: employees of the Komsomol district committee perform escort service functions for journalists. As in “The Zone,” in the “Compromise” cycle the action takes place against the backdrop of general, unrestrained drunkenness.

In search of a suitable newborn for the article “A Man is Born,” the hero of “Compromise” encounters numerous difficulties: the child’s father turns out to be either an Ethiopian or a Jew, which equally does not suit the newspaper editor. In the end, the parents of the hard-to-find baby are forced to name the child a fancy, archaic name. At the same time, it turns out that the family into which the child was born is dysfunctional: the husband drinks and is not going to live with the unloved mother of the newborn. The reality is completely at odds with its propaganda image created by the press.

The hero of Dovlatov’s prose is tormented by questions traditional for Russian literature about the unsettled life, the uncertainty of the future, the uncertainty of his thoughts and feelings.

Dovlatov does not limit himself to depicting the inhumanity of a totalitarian state. It shows the absurdity of human existence, the lack of harmony in the relationship between man and the world. In the tragically farcical conversation of the lyrical hero of the cycle with KGB major Belyaev, the latter advises: “... If I were you, I would rush out of here while they are letting me out... I have no chance.” A telephone conversation with his wife, who called from Austria, leads the hero to a generalization on the existential level: “I didn’t even ask - where will we meet?.. Maybe in heaven. Because paradise is a meeting place... A general cell where you can meet a loved one...” The hero discovers “the world as a single whole,” he acquires the ability to feel like a part of this whole, but this does not make him happy.

The starting points for Sergei Dovlatov’s artistic narrative were the works of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov (“Letter to the Publisher”).

The writer’s “zone” is structured as a philosophical essay, developing the ideas of a paradoxical modern world structure. The “zone” spread out on both sides of the camp fences,” “... the camp represents a fairly accurate model of the state. And specifically the Soviet state.” The camp has a political regime (internal rules), people (prisoners), and police (security). There is a party apparatus, culture, industry. There is everything that should be in the state.”

The world of Dovlatov’s “zone” was terrible. In this world, people killed for a pack of tea. But life went on. Moreover, the usual proportions of life were preserved here. The ratio of good and evil, grief and joy remained unchanged.

Warden Sergei Dovlatov admits that “the Soviet prison is one of countless forms of tyranny. One of the forms of totalitarian general violence.” However, the more vital the theater of the absurd becomes - the culmination of the work, where the roles of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky are played by the dangerous recidivist Gurin and the convicted Tsurikov, nicknamed Motyl.

One gets the feeling that the author’s literary text is woven from organums and diaphonies, i.e. two-voices, the world of “will” and the world of the zone,” which are essentially no different. Here is one of the brightest:

“If you draw a bison on a rock, you get a roast in the evening.” The author draws an analogy with camp painting (“camp portraits are unusually complimentary”). “In the wild, this is how major party leaders are portrayed,” writes Dovlatov. We agree that we can confidently equate the “buffalo formula” with modern mass media.

But there is beauty in camp life too. One of the delightful decorations is the intricate, picturesque, ornamental and dapper language. Camp speech helps Dovlatov’s heroes survive.

The camp monologue here is a complete theatrical performance. This is a farce, a bright, provocative and free creative action (D.S. Likhachev).

The speech of an experienced camp inmate replaces all the usual civilian decorations. Namely - hairstyle, foreign suit, boots, tie and glasses. Moreover - money, position in society, awards and regalia. Good camp speech is an advantage in camp on the same scale as physical strength. A good storyteller in a logging camp means much more than a good writer in Moscow.

The form of verbal combat is still alive in the camp: “What is your business there? Are you wrapping a toadstool for the anniversary?” The author often observed these battles - with warm-up, feigned apathy and sudden fireworks of murderous eloquence. With refined formulations at the level of Krylov and Lafontaine:

“The wolf takes the marked ones too...”

In the camp they do not swear on family and friends. here you won’t hear curses or verbose assurances. here they say:

I swear by freedom!

Speaking of freedom. Confessing his code of honor, Dovlatov’s hero may also find himself free behind bars, like, for example, the repeat offender Kuntsov (Alikhanov’s double).

“A year ago... Fidel stopped the stage for some offense. Having removed the fuse, he drove the column into the icy river. The prisoners stood silently, realizing how dangerous a six-shooter AKM is in the hands of a neurasthenic and a coward.

Sergey Dovlatov

Zone. Warden's Notes

Letter to the publisher

Dear Igor Markovich!

I risk approaching you with a delicate proposal. The gist of it is this.

For three years now I have been planning to publish my camp book. And all three years - as quickly as possible.

Moreover, it was “The Zone” that I should have published before anything else. After all, this is where my ill-fated writing began.

As it turns out, finding a publisher is extremely difficult. For example, two people refused me. And I wouldn't like to hide it.

The reasons for refusal are almost standard. Here, if you want, are the main arguments:

The camp theme is exhausted. The reader is tired of endless prison memoirs. After Solzhenitsyn, the topic should be closed...

These considerations do not stand up to criticism. Of course, I am not Solzhenitsyn. Does this deprive me of the right to exist?

And our books are completely different. Solzhenitsyn describes political camps. I am a criminal. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner. I am a supervisor. According to Solzhenitsyn, the camp is hell. I think that hell is ourselves...

Believe me, I am not comparing the scale of talent. Solzhenitsyn is a great writer and a huge personality. And enough of that.

Another consideration is much more convincing. The fact is that my manuscript is not a finished work.

This is a kind of diary, chaotic notes, a set of unorganized materials.

It seemed to me that in this chaos a general artistic plot could be traced. There is one lyrical hero acting there. Some unity of place and time was observed. In general, the only banal idea is declared - that the world is absurd...

The publishers were embarrassed by such a disorderly texture. They demanded more standard forms.

Then I tried to impose The Zone on them as a collection of short stories. The publishers said it was not profitable. That the public craves novels and epics.

The matter was complicated by the fact that the “Zone” arrived in parts. Before leaving, I photographed the manuscript on microfilm. My executor distributed pieces of it to several brave French women. They managed to smuggle my writings through customs cordons. The original is in the Union.

For several years I have been receiving tiny parcels from France. I'm trying to make a whole out of separate pieces.

The film is damaged in places. (I don’t know where my benefactors hid it.) Some fragments have been completely lost.

Restoring a manuscript from film to paper is a painstaking task. Even in America, with its technical power, this is not easy. And by the way, it's not cheap.

To date, thirty percent have been restored.

With this letter I am sending some part of the finished text. I will send the next excerpt in a few days. You'll receive the rest in the coming weeks. Tomorrow I'll rent a photo enlarger.

Maybe we can build a complete whole out of all this. I will try to make up for some of this with my irresponsible reasoning.

The main thing is to be lenient. And, as prisoner Khamraev said, going to a wet job, with God!..

Old Kalyu Pakhapil hated the occupiers. And he loved it when they sang in chorus, he liked bitter mash and small fat children.

“Only Estonians should live in these parts,” said Pakhapil, “and no one else.” Strangers have nothing to do here...

The men listened to him, nodding their heads approvingly.

Then the Germans came. They played harmonicas, sang, and treated the children to chocolate. Old Kalyu did not like all this. He was silent for a long time, then he got ready and went into the forest.

It was a dark forest that seemed impenetrable from a distance. There Pakhapil hunted, killed fish, and slept on spruce branches. In short, he lived until the Russians kicked out the invaders. And when the Germans left, Pakhapil returned. He appeared in Rakvere, where the Soviet captain awarded him a medal. The medal was decorated with four incomprehensible words, a figure and an exclamation point.

“Why does an Estonian need a medal?” - Pakhapil thought for a long time.

And yet he carefully secured it on the lapel of his Cheviot jacket. Kalyu wore this jacket only once - in Lansman's store.

N.M. Malygina

The work of Sergei Dovlatov has one significant feature: all of his works are autobiographical. Critics Peter Weil and Alexander Genis, who knew Sergei Dovlatov well, believe that all of this writer’s prose is his self-portrait.

The cycles of his stories are arranged in chronological order: “Zone” - about military service, “Compromise” - about work as a journalist, “Reserve” - about his stay in Pushkingorye, “Craft”, “Suitcase”, “Foreign Woman”, “Branch” - about leaving abroad and life in exile. What unites these works into a coherent book is the fate of their “lyrical hero,” as the author himself calls his literary counterpart.

“The Zone” is accompanied by the author’s commentary - “Letters to the Publisher.” This marks the beginning of his “ill-fated writing” and the difficult path to the publication of “The Zone.” In letters to the publisher of the “prison story”, unnoticed by the reader, tactfully and unobtrusively, but completely consciously, the writer creates his creative and spiritual biography.

“The Zone,” called by the author a “prison story,” was born as a result of a sharp change in the life of a prosperous philology student. After his third year at the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad University, Sergei Dovlatov was drafted into the army. He ended up in the convoy troops and remained an overseer in a special regime camp throughout his entire service.

Finding himself in the camp guard, a young man from an intelligent family was shocked by the truth revealed to him: “I was stunned by the depth and variety of life. I saw how low a person can fall. And how high he can soar. For the first time I understood what freedom, cruelty, and violence were. I saw freedom behind bars. Cruelty, senseless, like poetry. Violence, as common as dampness. I saw a man completely reduced to an animal state. I saw what he could be happy about. And it seems to me that I have seen the light.”

This author's declaration precisely defines the moral and aesthetic principles of Dovlatov's prose: its merciless realism, truthfulness and deep psychologism. Here, obvious connections between Dovlatov’s work and his literary predecessors are revealed.

The “Zone” cycle automatically included its author in the tradition of “camp” prose. Dovlatov had to defend the right to work on a topic that seemed exhausted to publishers after Solzhenitsyn: “Solzhenitsyn describes political camps. I am a criminal. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner. I am a supervisor. According to Solzhenitsyn, the camp is hell. I think that hell is ourselves...” Dovlatov noted that before him, two streams were distinguished in the literature about prisoners. In “convict” literature, of which Dostoevsky was a classic, the prisoner was portrayed as a sufferer, and the police as torturers. In “police” literature, on the contrary, the policeman looked like a hero, and the prisoner looked like a monster. Dovlatov’s unique experience showed that both of these scales were false. According to his observations, any prisoner was suitable for the role of a guard, and a guard deserved prison.

But the literary tradition with which Dovlatov’s prose is connected is not limited to the development of the “camp” theme that lies on the surface.

The shock of the “lyrical hero” Dovlatov is reminiscent of the state that the hero of I. Babel’s “Cavalry” Kirill Lyutov experienced when he found himself in Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army. Babel’s descriptions of the atrocities of the Poles during the civil war alternated with episodes indicating that the cavalry soldiers showed no less cruelty: they robbed, killed and took revenge, not even sparing their relatives.

Like the hero of “Cavalry,” Boris Alikhanov finds himself in inhumane circumstances: he is surrounded by criminals and camp guards, equally capable of any violence.

Corporal Petrov, nicknamed Fidel, is an illiterate person with a disturbed psyche; he becomes an alcoholic with catastrophic speed. His prayer is shocking in its expression of the hopelessness of the situation in which this man found himself and in the cruelty of his self-exposure: “Dear God! I hope you see this mess?! I hope you understand what vohra means?!<...>Give orders so that I don’t completely drink myself to death.” Fidel says about his colleagues: “Our audience is incomparable. Thieves and hooligans."

On New Year's Eve, an ugly drinking session takes place in the KGB barracks. After this, the main character of the cycle, Boris Alikhanov, recalls those episodes of childhood and youth that confirm that violence constantly invaded his previous “free” life. The hero Dovlatov - the author's double - has enough courage for tough introspection. He admits to himself that his silent complicity in the collective bullying of a school sneak, a shameful episode of his student years in a sports camp outside Koktebel testify to his similarity with the rapists from the camp guard, confirm that violence has become the norm of life both in the camp and in the wild . Theft for which pilot Mishuk is serving time is no less everyday perceived in this world. He ended up in the camp for theft by accident, since he had previously managed to steal with impunity. Mishuk’s comrades who remain free continue to steal. People in the camp and in the wild are no different from each other; they do the same things. Their presence on opposite sides of the barbed wire is due to pure chance.

Dovlatov has a generalized picture of a society living under criminal laws. Dovlatov shows a world in which cruelty, violence and lies reign on both sides of the barbed wire. The central image-symbol of the cycle is a description of the village of Chebyu, in which people released from prison settled, trying to stay close to the camp because they had forgotten how to live in freedom. Dovlatov’s generalization is reminiscent of the conclusions to which the study of the camp life of the author of “Kolyma Tales” Varlam Shalamov led. An even earlier predecessor of Dovlatov was, undoubtedly, the author of “Sakhalin” - A.P. Chekhov, whom Dovlatov always considered an unattainable example.

The camp experience allowed Dovlatov to rethink the problem of the relationship between good and evil in man. The camp appears in “The Zone” as a spatio-temporal situation that predisposes a person to evil, who is capable of showing humanity in other circumstances. Dovlatov’s hero notices in himself traits formed by a life built on camp laws.

And at the same time, Dovlatov enters into polemics with Shalamov, believing that in life, despite everything, goodness and selflessness remain. The author of “The Zone” sees manifestations of humanity in both prisoners and their guards, refusing to paint them only with black paint. This quality also reminds us of the author of “Cavalry”: for his hero, Lyutov, the Cossacks who fought in Budyonny’s army, brave men and “junk hunters,” aroused both horror and admiration.

With kind feeling, Dovlatov describes the love story of captain Boris Egorov and graduate student Katya Lugina. Katya, comparing Boris with her friends “Marika and Shurik”, understands that he is a strong man with whom she feels small and helpless. The author wonders why in the story about Yegorov’s love the captain turned out to be so handsome, while in the service he seemed, to put it mildly, an unattractive person. Dovlatov describes the love story of teacher Isolda Shchukina and criminal Makeev, who at 60 years old still had 14 years left in prison. Their only meeting took place in front of a column of prisoners and showed that these people retained faith in the sanctity of love.

The reality of the camp acutely confronted the artist with the problem of freedom. “Letters to the publisher” interspersing the narrative create a two-dimensionality of the work. Letters about the departure of Dovlatov's hero to emigrate are connected with a description of the village of Chebyu, inhabited by former prisoners who do not know how to live in freedom.

Dovlatov does not limit himself to depicting the inhumanity of a totalitarian state. It shows the absurdity of human existence in general. He is tormented by the lack of harmony in the relationship between man and the world. At the end of the “Reserve” cycle, a tragic conversation between the lyrical hero of Dovlatov’s prose and KGB major Belyaev is reproduced, who advises: “... if I were you, I would rush out of here while they are releasing me... I have no chance.” A telephone conversation with his wife, who called from Austria, leads the hero to a generalization on the existential level: “I didn’t even ask - where will we meet?.. Maybe in heaven. Because paradise is a meeting place... A general cell where you can meet a loved one...” “The world as a single whole” is revealed to the hero, he acquires the ability to feel like a part of this whole.

Leaving the country is associated with leaving a long-term prison. It is shown that reality, based on camp standards of life, pushes out a person who is not capable of compromise with the “zone.”

Long before Russian society entered its current state of freedom and openness, Dovlatov showed with amazing accuracy the costs of freedom. Its emigrants resemble the residents of the village of Chebyu, crippled by the camp world and having lost their moral guidelines. And all of them together make it possible to understand the reasons for the processes that we have been observing in our lives for about ten years now: freedom was given to people who do not have internal moral self-restraint, who do not know how to use it without harming others.

The camp is depicted by Dovlatov as a model of Soviet society, an institution that is Soviet in spirit. The writer exposed the falsity of ideology, which does not correspond to the true motives of people's behavior and is refuted by the state of reality. Dovlatov showed the contrast between camp life and the ideological schemes declared here. The conversation with the guard soldiers in Lenin's room takes place amid the screams of a pig, which they are trying to drag into a truck to take it to the slaughterhouse. The sharp contrast of the false and hypocritical words of the ideological worker with the surrounding filth and cruelty is enhanced by the image-symbol of the transformation of a person into a submissive and dirty animal. This metaphor unfolds and is realized in the plot of “The Zone.”

The nature of human perception in the “Zone” cycle indicates the writer’s predecessors: the reduction of man to the level of biological existence was the subject of depiction in Dostoevsky’s novels “Crime and Punishment”, “Demons”, in Chekhov’s story “Duel”, and later in Platonov’s story “The Pit” "and his story "Garbage Wind", Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", the novel "Life and Fate" by V. Grossman and "Kolyma Stories" by V. Shalamov.

The author's double, who runs through all the stories - the chapters of the "Zone" cycle, forming a "sort of diary", resembles the hero of I. Babel's "Cavalry" - the intellectual Kirill Lyutov with his "chronicle of everyday atrocities."

The hero of the “Zone”, warden Boris Alikhanov, is an intellectual. Like Lyutov, who failed to become “one of our own” for the fighters of the First Cavalry, Dovlatov’s lyrical hero “...was a stranger to everyone. For prisoners, soldiers, officers and free camp workers. Even the guard dogs considered him a stranger. An absent-minded and at the same time anxious smile constantly wandered across his face. You can recognize an intellectual by it even in the taiga.” Lyutov left the First Cavalry as a stranger to his fellow fighters, accused of striving to live without violence. “Cavalry” describes several cases when Lyutov miraculously avoided reprisals because he could not kill a person, went into battle and did not load his weapon.

The hero of “The Zone” is saved by a “defensive reaction”: “I felt better than I could have expected. I started to have a split personality. Life has become a plot. I remember well how it happened. My consciousness came out of its usual shell. I started thinking of myself in the third person.<...>If I faced a cruel test, my mind quietly rejoiced. He had new material at his disposal.<...>In fact, I already wrote. My literature has become an addition to life. An addition without which life would be completely indecent.”

Dovlatov is disingenuous when he calls the stories of “The Zone” “chaotic notes.” They turn into chapters of a complete work, united by the fate of the author’s double - the hero of “The Zone” Boris Alikhanov. The “Zone” genre is genetically related to the “Cavalry” genre: the “prison story” is divided into chapters, each of which can be perceived as a separate story. The works are similar in that each of the stories in the cycle features a new character, considered in relationships with others and in the context of his era. A whole system of character images emerges: Gustav Pakhapil, pilot Mishuk, corporal Petrov, prisoner Kuptsov, political officer Khuriev, captain Pavel Egorov. The author created vivid images of his contemporaries, refusing to divide characters into “bad” and “good”. Captain Egorov, a “stupid and vicious animal,” fell in love with graduate student Katya Lugina and discovered the ability to care and compassion for a loved one.

Dovlatov created a unique, precise, spare and aphoristic language. His style is characterized by refined simplicity. The use of anecdotal situations, the everyday nature and simplicity of his themes make his prose a fascinating read. Dovlatov's popularity increases over time. This is also explained by the writer’s moral orientation, openly expressed in the “Craft” cycle: “I love America,<...>I am grateful to America, but my homeland is far away. Beggar, hungry, crazy and drunk! Having lost, ruined and rejected her best sons!<...>Our homeland is ourselves.<...>Everything that happened to us was our homeland. And everything that happened will remain forever...”

The obvious autobiographical nature of Dovlatov's prose does not exhaust its content.

It recreates a portrait of the “era of stagnation”, amazing in the depth and scope of its generalization.

The criticism expressed the opinion that Dovlatov is an artist of a world that has sunk into the past. But if our world is ourselves, Dovlatov will forever remain the chronicler of our time and our contemporary.

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