The satirical works of Sergei Dovlatov have found an enthusiastic and appreciative audience among Russians émigrés, Western readers and with glasnost′, his own compatriots. Dovlatov was born September 3, 1941 in Ufa, Bashkiria, where his parents had been evacuated during World War II. After his family's return to Leningrad in 1944, he spent his childhood and youth in that most Western of Soviet cities. Indeed, his work may be seen as an outgrowth of the Leningrad Prose movement of the sixties and seventies. His parents were both connected with the theater, his father as a director, his mother as an actress. Dovlatov himself has more than once commented on his unusual ethnic heritage; he was Jewish on his father's side and Armenian on his mother's side.

Reaching maturity during Khrushchev's Thaw, Dovlatov was a member of the disaffected and alienated post-War and post-Stalin generation. Like his literary peers Aksenov, Bitov and Voinovich, he rejected (implicitly if not explicitly) the tenets of socialist realism and sought inspiration in the gritty, sometimes seamy aspects of Soviet urban contemporaneity. The literary influences most clearly operative in his prose are Ernest Hemingway, Erich-Maria Remarque and J. D. Salinger, whom he read in translations that appeared during the Thaw period.