LIMMUD FSU Recharge Presenters 2016

Elena Dovlatova was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and spent the first half of her life there, with the exception of the five years spent in the evacuation during World War II. There she went to school, got a college degree in printing and publishing, worked in several large publishing houses, got married, and had a daughter. After emigrating, she spent two weeks in Vienna and four months in Italy, eventually settling in New York in 1978, a place that turned out to have great significance for her and her family.

In her first two and a half years in New York, Elena Dovlatova worked in "Novoye Russkoye Slovo" (The New Russian Word), at that time the only Russian-language daily newspaper in the West. Then came "Novyi amerikanets" (The New American) -- the first weekly newspaper published by the members of the third wave of the Russian emigration. Elena's husband Sergei Dovlatov soon became its editor-in-chief, while Elena typed the articles and their daughter translated the weekly TV guide for the paper. At that time there was no Russian television or radio in the US.

During this time Elena's family saw the arrival of its first American -- her son Nicholas. In the meantime, all the books written by Sergei Dovlatov were finally published in Russian and translated into many other languages. In 1990 Sergei passed away. Practically overnight, he was acclaimed as a great Russian writer. In 2014, the intersection of 108th Street and 63rd Drive in Queens was named after him and became known as Sergei Dovlatov Way. This couldn't have happened without the initiative of a great number of fans of Dovlatov's work, who petitioned City Hall to allow the street to be named after Sergei. This is the street on which Elena Dovlatova still lives.​