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Showing posts from January, 2015

The Suitcase

I took Sergei Dovlatov's The Suitcase with me on a short holiday to the salt baths in the South of Lithuania.  I got a great kick out of this set of anecdotes based on articles of clothing from the Soviet era.  Dovlatov's books are few but are being reprinted and we should all be thankful for it.  He looks at the Soviet past with a wry sense of humor.  I particularly liked his short piece on a statue of Lenin with his two caps. The New Yorker has a great piece on Dovlatov lifted from the afterward of Pushkin Hills , which is next on my reading list.  He was a journalist for many years, which he recounts in The Suitcase , as well as other brief stints as a sculptor's apprentice.  The Lenin stature fiasco sets up and even more farcical piece on a huge wall relief for a subway station devoted to Mikhail Lomonosov, out of which Sergei managed to nab the mayor's boots. The stories are more or less based on his experiences, set up when his son discovers the suitcas