Sergei Dovlatov

[1] Dovlatov was born on 3 September 1941 in Ufa, the capital of Bashkir ASSR in the Soviet Union, where his family had been evacuated in the beginning of World War II from Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and lived with a collaborator of The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) for three years.

There, he became acquainted with the Leningrad poets Yevgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman, Joseph Brodsky, the writer Sergey Wolf, and the artist Alexander Ney.

In 1979, Dovlatov emigrated from the Soviet Union with his mother, Nora, and came to live with his wife and daughter in New York City, where he later co-edited The New American, a liberal, Russian-language émigré newspaper.

Published during his lifetime: Joseph Brodsky said of Dovlatov, "He is the only Russian writer whose works will be read all the way through"[6] and that: "The decisive thing is his tone, which every member of a democratic society can recognize: the individual who won't let himself be cast in the role of a victim, who is not obsessed with what makes him different.

[10] The petition to request this honor was signed by 18,000 people; in the same year a new edition, translated by his daughter Katherine Dovlatov, of the author's 'Pushkin Hills' was published.

The opening ceremony was held at the corner of 108th Street and 63rd Drive on 7 September 2014; three Russian television news stations recorded the event and the celebration continued at the late author's home nearby.