“MAN FOR MAN MIGHT BE ANYTHING”: ON THE SPECIFICS OF THE WORLD OF SERGEY DOVLATOV’S CHARACTERS
The article analyzes the world of characters from Dovlatov’s work “The Suitcase”, based on the anthropological theory, which is also found in “The Zone” (the author himself calls these reflections of his “a treatise”). According to this conception, a human being is an unstable product of the changing circumstances, that is to say, literally “anything”. Until recently, critics have rarely paid attention to Dovlatov’s “treatise”. However, there is every reason to believe that, not only in the book “The Zone”, but also in other works of the writer, the image of his characters is constructed in accordance with the idea that a person is a product of the realities and circumstances surrounding them. Thus, the “treatise” formulates the principles that play an important role in Dovlatov’s artistic philosophy and form the basis of his characters’ world. The analysis proves that the principle of “instability” and paradoxical interchangeability of the individuals really plays a major role in his characters’ world in “The Suitcase”. This book, in fact, is a long and complex series of variations on the theme “man is anything”. The protagonist of “The Suitcase” invariably experiences great difficulties in the situations in which he needs to answer a seemingly simple question about who he is.