Roma Liberov. Film "Written by Sergei Dovlatov

WE ALL HAVE OUR OWN DOVLATOV.

"In the struggle against the absurd, this is the way to act. The reaction should be just as absurd."
Sergei Dovlatov

Sergei Dovlatov was a Russian writer and journalist. Not one of his significant works was published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime, he was known exclusively through samizdat. In 1978, because of persecution, the inability to work and lack of livelihood emigrated first to Vienna and then to the United States, where his work was published. He died on August 24, 1990, in New York, the same day on which he left the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s, he became the second Russian writer, after Vladimir Nabokov, to be published in The New Yorker.

"Everyone wonders what happens after death? After death, the story begins," Dovlatov wrote in his Notebooks.

Dovlatov was not published in the USSR. In America he had 14 books published. However, the real "history" of the writer Dovlatov paradoxically began not in America, but in Russia, where people began to read his books avidly in the 1990s, after his death.

"I don't really care that much about the biographical circumstances of any of the people I love or about whom I do something. I take it this way: everything that was really important to Dovlatov from what happened to him, from the biographical details, from the worldview shifts - everything that was really important is in the plane of the text."
Roma Liberov about the film "Written by Sergei Dovlatov

ROMA LIBEROV
Russian filmmaker, scriptwriter, producer. Since 2009 has been working on a series of films in memory of Russian writers, in which he uses non-fiction and staged shootings, animation, puppet and shadow theater, installations, computer graphics, etc. The director's visual language conveys the literary style of the writers about whom the film is made. Journalists call this style quasi-documentary cinema. He attracted actors for the project: Armen Jigarkhanyan, Valentin Gaft, Inna Churikova, Sergei Makovetsky, Viktor Sukhorukov, Chulpan Khamatova, Sergei Puskepalis and others.