Sergei Dovlatov suffered from alcoholism. According to the literary scholar Aryev, who knew Dovlatov well in his youth: “It was a more or less widespread phenomenon because, in general, we all drank quite a lot. And although it was common in the bohemian and simply literary circles, the way all those Stalin Prize laureates and masters of socialist realism drank — it’s beyond comprehension. We were not even close to them. They simply drank somewhere behind their blue fences to the point of madness, while we had to move from store to store, scrounging money somewhere and everything else.”
In his interview, sculptor Ernst Neizvestny notes: “The thing is, I drank with him. His drunkenness, from a psychiatric point of view — and you don’t need to be a psychiatrist for this, any drinking man knows — was a form of suicide. Exactly the way he drank. Not in terms of quantity, but psychologically. It was as if he was stabbing a knife into his own heart and saying: ‘Take this, take this, take this’… It was a dark Russian drunkenness, which is vividly reflected in Vysotsky’s songs: ‘What kind of house is so quiet…’, ‘Everything’s wrong! Everything’s wrong, guys.’ Therefore, there was some urge to run away somewhere, but where to run? — to death, of course, that was his.”
In 1990, Sergei Dovlatov began working on another collection of stories, which he titled The Refrigerator. He planned to dedicate all the stories in this book to food. However, the writer managed to create only two novellas. The story “The Old Rooster Baked in Clay” became his last completed work.
On August 24, 1990, Sergei Dovlatov felt unwell. On the same day, he died in an ambulance from heart failure. In the Queens district of New York, there is a large and old cemetery called Mount Hebron, located right behind Meadow Lake and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The cemetery is predominantly Jewish, but there are also Armenian, Georgian, Russian, and various other graves. Our former compatriots can be easily recognized by the image of the deceased on the tombstone. You will need Block No. 9 on the grounds. Its location can be found on the cemetery map. Then you should approach its lower side (if looking at the map) and look for Section 20. It is marked by a faint red number 20 painted on one of the graves.
Sources:
https://m-necropol.ru/dovlatov.html
http://www.sergeidovlatov.com/life.html
