Affiliate (novel)
Encyclopedia
Affiliate (Russian: Филиал (Записки ведущего)) is a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by the Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n writer Sergei Dovlatov. It was written in 1990 and first published in America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

Plot introduction

The story is set in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 in the 1980s, and then moves to Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

. It is told in the first person
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...

 by a man called Dalmatov, seemingly loosely based on Dovlatov himself: he is an immigrant from Russia, and an unsuccessful writer, working for the American-based Russian-language press.

Dalmatov presents a programme in Russian on the radio, and is sent to Los Angeles to report on a conference of Soviet dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....

s. When he arrives, he bumps into his first love, Tasya, and the memories of their courtship when they both lived in the Soviet Union come flooding back.

Analysis

The story is told in episodic form, in a style reminiscent of aphorism
Aphorism
An aphorism is an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form.The term was first used in the Aphorisms of Hippocrates...

s. Present day events are interspersed with flashback
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...

s from the narrator's youth. The is a heavy emphasis on the absurd
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...

, and how it can bring levity to depressing reality.

Publication history

The book was first published in New York by publishing house Слово (Word) in 1990.
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