Ours: A Russian Family Album

Sergei Dovlatov’s The Compromise (“Fresh and funny!” said Kurt Vonnegut) and The Zone won him acclaim throughout the American literary establishment. His writings in The New Yorker and other prominent periodicals have made him one of the most widely read of Russian émigré authors. In Ours, he traces four generations of Russian family life – and the very course of modern Soviet history – through a portrait of the Dovlatov clan: from Uncle Aron, whose political convictions wavered with his own unstable health; to upstanding Cousin Boris, the family’s pride, who found he was happy only when in trouble with the authorities; to larger-than-life Grandpa Isaak; to the wildly comic story of how Dovlatov met his wife; to off-the-wall tales of parents and cousins, uncles and children, and even the pet dog.
In the tradition of the great Russian satirists, featuring the same irreverence and irony for which Dovlatov’s previous works were celebrated, Ours is an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable group self-portrait by one of the freshest voices to emerge from the Soviet Union.