On September 5th the U.S. Consulate General, along with its partners from the Vladivostok media and cultural community, hosted a public presentation of the unique photo album “Sergey Dovlatov in Nina Alovert’s photographs and memoirs.” The book, timed for the 75th anniversary of the late, popular Russian-American writer’s birth, represents another tangible bridge between Russian and American cultures: the project was authored by renowned Russian-American photographer Nina Alovert, initiated and supported by U.S. Consulate General Vladivostok Consulate, and designed and edited by local journalists, writers, and Consulate public affairs staff. 134 photos selected for publication, as well as concise yet insightful author captions by the author (Nina Alovert was Dovlatov’s close friend) chronicle Dovlatov’s life and work in New York after his emigration from the Soviet Union. The album also portrays a myriad of the writer’s friends and partners – Josef Brodskiy, Ernst Neizvestnyy, Mikhail Shemyakin, and many others – and thus presents readers with a broad picture of joys and hardships of the Russian cultural émigré elite building news lives in America. The book has made a huge splash in Vladivostok: the presentation attracted all principal media and representatives from the top cultural and educational institutions.
