lightness of touch, his insouciance, his humor. Style is inevitably flattened and distorted in translation, and a slangy, informal style is particularly difficult to render. In this respect,The Zone is exceptionally successful among recent translations from Russian. Dovlatov is fortunate indeed in his translator, Anne Frydman; in turn, Frydman acknowledges the help of her husband, Stephen Dixon, a prolific short-story writer and a novelist, who may have contributed to the translation’s idiomatic rhythms.

The prison camp narratives which make up the bulk of the book vary in length and form, ranging from anecdotes or sketches of two or three pages to fully shaped stories with a conventional dramatic structure (conflict and resolution), though even the latter tend toward the anecdotal. The stories are loosely unified by two themes, both of which are outlined by Dovlatov himself in his letters to Yefimov: first, the emblematic significance of prison life; second, the making of a writer, the growth of a writer’s consciousness.

There is a long tradition of Russian prison literature, Dovlatov observes, in which “the inmate appears as the suffering, tragic figure, deserving of admiration and pity. The guard, correspondingly, is a monster and villain, the incarnation of cruelty and violence.” On the other hand, he notes, there is a tradition of “police” literature (“from Chesterton to Agatha Christie”), in which “the inmate appears as the monster, the fiend, while the policeman is a hero, a moralist, a vivid artistic personality. His own experiences as a guard, Dovlatov says, taught him that these opposing viewpoints are both wrong. Instead of a sharp moral distinction, he detected a “striking similarity between the camp and the outside, between the prisoners and the guards”:We were very similar to each other, and even interchangeable. Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard. Almost any guard deserved a prison term. I repeat—this is the main aspect of prison life. Everything else is peripheral. All of my stories are written about this.

Dovlatov does not seem to realize that this perceived identity between camp and outside, prisoner and guard, far from being a radical alternative is in fact a cliché of contemporary literature—a cliché, fortunately, that is being treated with increasing skepticism. Dovlatov’s infatuation with the appealing but morally blurred viewpoint is the book’s only notable weakness, but it is not as serious a weakness as one might conclude from the passage quoted above, for the stories themselves are not quite so thesis-ridden as Dovlatov’s declaration suggests. The stories indeed show prisoners and guards alike as fallible, often ridiculous human beings, but they do not for the most part insist on the naïve and pernicious theory of moral equivalence that Dovlatov advances in his letters.

The second unifying theme, Dovlatov’s birth as a writer, is more interesting. In one of the early letters to Yefimov, dated February 23, he explains how the horrors of camp life, instead of overwhelming him, transformed him:I felt better than could have been expected. I began to have a divided personality. Life was transformed into literary material . Even when I suffered physically, I felt fine. Hunger, pain, anguish—everything became material for my tireless consciousness.

Indeed, he adds, in his mind he was “already writing . What was left was to transfer all this to paper. I tried to find the words.” Thus concludes the letter to Yefimov, and immediately there follows a story in which Dovlatov’s alter ego, prison guard Boris Alikhanov, experiences the transformation that Dovlatov has described in the letter.

Dovlatov’s account of his “calling” is animated by a tension which allows him to avoid both cynicism and sentimentalism. On the one hand, he describes the growth of a writer’s consciousness in religious terms: “Flesh and spirit existed apart. The more dispirited the flesh, the more insolently the spirit romped.” Similarly, in the story that follows, Alikhanov the newborn writer experiences a quasi-religious epiphany:“The world had become alive and safe as in a painting. It looked back at him closely without anger or reproach. And it seemed, the world expected something from him.

On the other hand, Dovlatov acknowledges, “there is a large measure of immorality in all this”—that is, in the detachment whereby life becomes “material” for literature: “When a camp thief was strangled before my eyes outside of Ropcha, my consciousness did not fail to record every detail.” Throughout the book, Dovlatov is sensitive to this conflict without belaboring it.

Ultimately, then, the story of The Zone is the story of the making of a writer, telling of the strange and wonderful capacity of the human mind to float detached from the organism in which it is nested. Appropriately, the last words of the book, in the last letter to Yefimov, offer a backhanded, self-referential tribute to the writer’s calling:It was not I who chose this effete, raucous, torturous, burdensome profession. It chose me itself, and now there is no way to get away from it. You are reading the last page, I am opening a new notebook