The novel ''The Suitcase'', by the Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov (translated by Bland Ashiku). The narrator of the novel "The Suitcase", Sergei Dovlatov, the author's namesake, is forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union. He is allowed to take only one suitcase with him, which he then puts in a corner of the house and forgets its contents and existence. Years later, the suitcase accidentally comes back to his attention. Taking out a series of objects from it - a pair of synthetic socks, a pair of shoes, a suit or an old coat - Dovlatov tells how each object came into his hands, thus telling his story during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Written in short sentences and dialogues condensed to the maximum, the novel "The Suitcase" describes gloomy times with piercing irony, but each character, including the narrator himself, is presented with the highest dignity and the most unparalleled humanity. The events described, the characters revealed by the narrative, are likely to evoke for many the experience of overcoming two systems in Albania, first-hand faces and lived situations, with the same hopes, the same failures, the same disappointed illusions.
Sergei Dovlatov was born in 1941 in Ufa (former BS, present-day Russia), where his family had been evacuated from Leningrad due to World War II. His father was a theater director, his mother a literary proofreader. Dovlatov studied Finnish at Leningrad State University, but dropped out. He worked as a prison guard for the Soviet army, as a tour guide, and then as a journalist and correspondent for a number of newspapers and periodicals of the time. He wrote short stories and novels during this time, but failed to publish them. Many of his texts circulated as samizdat and were smuggled out of the USSR for publication in Europe, which led to his expulsion from the Union of Journalists, and finally, his departure to the United States in 1979. He was part of that constellation of Russian authors and artists who became great on a world scale only in exile, where the best known, friend and supporter of his work was the poet Joseph Brodsky. In America, Dovlatov wrote for the Russian exile press in New York. Here he experienced some belated success and here he died, of cardiac arrest, in 1990, at the age of 48.
