Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov Read Free Book Online

provincial author.
    Within a year, he succeeded in publishing seven short stories and a novella. His creations were banal, ideologically sound and dull. A recognizable thread ran through all of them. A reliable armour of literary conventionality protected them from censorship. They sounded convincing, like quotations. The most exciting things about them were syntax errors and misprints:
    “Misha excepted that he had finally turned thirteen…” (From the story ‘Misha’s Woe’.)
    “‘May he rest in piece!’ Odintsov concluded his speech…” (From the story ‘The Smoke Rises Skyward’.)
    “‘Don’t throw a wench in the works,’ threatened Lepko…” (From the novel Seagulls Fly to the Horizon .)
    Later Pototsky would say to me:
    “I’m a fuckin’ writer, sort of like Chekhov. Chekhov was absolutely right. You can write a story just about anything. There’s no shortage of subject matter. Take any profession. Say a doctor. And here you have it: a fuckin’ surgeon goes to operateand recognizes his patient as the man who slept with his wife. The surgeon is faced with a moral fuckin’ dilemma – to save the man or cut off his… No, that’s too much, that’s fuckin’ overkill. Bottom line, the surgeon is hesitant. Then he picks up a scalpel and performs a miracle. The fuckin’ end goes something like this: ‘For a long, long time the nurse’s gaze followed him…’ Or take the sea, for example,” Pototsky went on, “Nothing to it… A sailor retires and leaves his beloved fuckin’ ship. His friends, his past, his youth are all left behind. He goes for a walk along the Fontanka River, looking forlorn. And he spots a fuckin’ drowning boy. Without a second thought the sailor leaps into the icy vortex. Risking his life, he saves the kid. The end goes like this: ‘Vitya will never forget this hand. Large, calloused, with a light-blue anchor on the wrist…’ Meaning – a sailor will always be a sailor, even if he is fuckin’ retired…”
    Pototsky would complete a story a day. He published a book. It was called Dark Roads to Happiness . It received kind reviews that gently pointed out the author’s backwater origins.
    Stasik decided to leave Cheboksary. He wanted to spread his wings, so he moved to Leningrad and became very fond of the Europa restaurant and two models.
    In Leningrad, his stories were received coolly. The standards there were a little higher. A complete absence of talent did not pay, while its presence made people nervous. Genius instilled fear. The most bankable were “obvious literary abilities”. Pototsky had no obvious abilities. Something glimmered in his compositions, slipped through, flickered. An accidental phrase, an unexpected remark… “Opaline bulb of garlic.” “Astewardess on paraffin legs.” But no obvious abilities.
    They stopped publishing him. What was forgiven a provincial novice affronted in a cosmopolitan writer. Stasik started to drink, and not in Europa but in artists’ basements. And not with models, but with the floor-monitor friend. (She now sold fruit from a stall.)
    He drank for four years. Did a year for vagrancy. The floor-monitor friend (now a worker in the food industry) left him. He may have given her a beating, or stolen from her…
    His clothes turned into rags. Friends ceased lending him money and refrained from giving him cast-off slacks. The militia threatened to throw him back in jail for violating the residency rules. Someone put him on to Pushkin Hills. This lifted his spirits. Stasik prepared, began giving tours. And he wasn’t bad. His trump card was his confiding intimacy:
    “Pushkin’s personal tragedy causes us heartache even to this day…”
    Pototsky embellished his monologues with fantastic detail, acted out the duel scene in character, and once even fell on the grass. He would conclude the tour with a mysterious metaphysical contrivance:
    “Finally, after a long and agonizing illness, Russia’s great citizen had