Sergei Dovlatov and His Narrative Masks

6. The Suitcase and The Fridge

131 Chapter Six The Suitcase and The Fridge THE STORIES comprising Chemodan (The Suitcase) were written in the 1980s in New York and published in full there in 1986.1 A preliminary publication, “Rasskazy iz chemodana” (“Tales from a Suitcase”), lacking the story “Kurtka Fernana Lezhe” (“Fernand Léger’s Jacket”), had been published a year before in the periodical Grani no. 137, 1985. The English translation of The Suitcase appeared just a few days after Dovlatov’s death in 1990. The pretext for this collection of stories is the author’s discovery, some time after emigrating from the Soviet Union, of a battered old suitcase he had brought with him and which is now gathering dust in his wardrobe. Rummaging through the suitcase provides the impulse for the eight stories that make up this cycle.2 “I am writing about my clothes. Something akin to Erenburg’s Thirteen Pipes,” as Dovlatov put it.3 Each of the items found in the suitcase serves as the basis for a story about a bizarre event connected with the item’s acquisition (similar to stories from the lives of protagonists of different nationalities in Erenburg’s novella). “The Finnish Nylon Socks” describes Dovlatov’s attempt to become a black market dealer while still at university.4 In “A Decent Double-Breasted Suit” he is working as a journalist and is approached by the KGB to spy on a Swede. “A Poplin Shirt” examines the narrator’s troubled relationship with his wife and her decision to leave the Soviet Union. T. V. Tsiv’ian in her article “Veshchi iz chemodana Sergeiia Dovlatova i byvshaia (?) sovetskaia model’ mira” (“Things from Sergei Dovlatov’s Suitcase and the Former (?) Soviet Model of the World”) suggests that the story cycle begins with a relatively positive notion of ownership, while it very quickly transpires that what is owned is a pile of old rags, and that belongings as such do not exist.5 The next logical step is that there is no need to have any belongings. Tsiv’ian considers this to be Dovlatov’s protest against the Soviet “veshchevoi/veshchnyi” (material[istic]) world. However, this argument can be taken a step further. Those emigrating from the Soviet Union were allowed to take no more than three suitcases each. In the event, the narrator Chapter Six 132 managed with one. In the United States it transpired that the things he had brought were unnecessary, and that only the intangible things enclosed in the suitcase retained their value: “On the bottom was Karl Marx. On the lid was Brodsky. And between them, my lost, my precious, my only life.” (“Na dne—Karl Marks. Na kryshke—Brodskii. A mezhdu nimi—propashchaia, bestsennaia, edinstvennaia zhizn’ ”; SS 3:289.) Mark Lipovetsky considers that in this introduction to the cycle “a perfectly postmodernist narrative frame is established.”6 Contemplating the contents of the suitcase, the narrator remarks with sadness that this is all that he has managed to accumulate in thirty-six years of life, eighteen of which were spent working. As the stories progress, the reader gradually realizes that none of the items was in fact purchased for money earned: the socks were obtained as the result of black marketeering, the shoes the narrator admits to having stolen from the mayor of Leningrad, the suit is a “present” from the newspaper administration/KGB, the poplin shirt is a parting gift from his wife, and so on. In her article “O nazvaniiakh dovlatovskikh knizhek” (“On the Titles of Dovlatov’s Books”), Ksana Mechik-Blank argues that the title The Suitcase is a symbol of all Dovlatov’s wanderings.7 The following final paragraph was added in the “Afterword” to the English translation of the novel: The journey doesn’t end. And when my turn comes I will come to some other gates. And I will hold in my hand a cheap American suitcase. And I will hear: What did you bring to us? Here, I will reply, look. And I will also add: Not without reason—any book, even the least serious, has the shape of a suitcase.8 Igor’ Smirnov argues that in the postwar period wanderings (strannichestvo) became as much a literary phenomenon as an existential matter, citing as examples Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (1962). “For the wanderer no earthly boundaries have any meaning; what is relevant to him is the threshold dividing being from other-being,” writes Smirnov.9 The...