The Reserve

The mid-1970s, the era of stagnation at its peak. Boris Alihanov, an unsuccessful writer from Leningrad with a host of personal problems, arrives in the summer at an open-air museum to work part-time as a tour guide. Behind a series of absurd situations in which the protagonist finds himself lies an inner drama, a fracture, a crisis of a person mired in unclear relationships, alcoholism, and creative failures. The events take place in the Pushkin Hills, a significant place for Russian culture. Once, Pushkin was a living person; however, for those surrounding Alihanov, he is a monument, a portrait on the wall. «I wanted to portray in the Pushkin Reserve a literary person whose problems lie in the same aspects as Pushkin's: money, wife, creativity, state, — wrote Dovlatov. — And it's not at all about the protagonist's abilities... but about the reserve itself, which is depicted like a mausoleum, in the indifference and blindness of those around it.»
The book also includes «The Zone» — a novella in fourteen episodes about the lives of convicts and their guards, stories of coexistence behind barbed wire, told simply and with sobering humor, behind which one can clearly hear: «Hell is us ourselves.»