This phrase, attributed to a Soviet writer, was widely circulated on the Internet. We decided to check if he said something similar.

A quote about who benefits from the war, indicating the authorship of Sergei Dovlatov, can be find V Facebook* (for example, containing it fast dated March 6, 2023, received 116,000 likes at the time of writing), “VKontakte", Twitter And Telegram. It can also be found on blogs in “LiveJournal" and even in some media (for example, "Chief editor" And "Uncensored"). Some Internet users lead it as an argument when discussing news.

This quotation is not found in either an exact or even approximately similar form in any of the literary or journalistic works. works Dovlatova. It was also not possible to find it either in the letters or in the texts of the writer’s speeches. Search complete quotes or individual her parts according to the database of the National Corpus of the Russian Language - the largest collection of digitized literary Russian-language texts - also did not produce results. In some of Dovlatov’s works there is indeed a division of people into talented and untalented (for example, in the stories “March of the Lonely", "Compromise", "Craft", etc.), however, in the context of attitudes towards war - not even once.

In Google Books indeed meets such a phrase, and in several at once books. However, in them attributed to not to Sergei Dovlatov at all, but to the satirist Mikhail Zadornov. It is worth noting that in social networks, as well as on resources with selections of various quotes the attribution of this statement to Zadornov is more popular than to Dovlatov. However, “Verified” also failed to confirm that the satirist ever uttered this phrase, although it was precisely under the guise of Zadornov’s aphorism that she appeared on the Internet no later than 2009.

Apparently, the writer was first mentioned as the author of this phrase on February 17, 2022 in the Telegram channel “City of Foolov" At least we were unable to find earlier cases of such attribution on the Internet. The post received 49,000 views and about 280 shares. In addition to the statement itself, the post included a photograph of Sergei Dovlatov carrying his son on a sled. In some subsequent publications (for example, in the same Facebook post dated March 6, 2023), the quote was also accompanied by this photo or placed directly on it, although in meaning it was in no way connected with it. This indirectly indicates that users saw the quote and photo together and distributed it without checking whether the writer actually said this.

Thus, there is no evidence that Sergei Dovlatov ever said a phrase about the benefits of war for untalented people - it is not in his works or in any other texts he wrote. The first mention of this quote in connection with the name of the writer that we were able to find dates back to 2022. It is unlikely that 32 years after Dovlatov’s death, someone found new, previously unknown written sources of his authorship containing this phrase. At least in this case, the news about the found manuscripts of Dovlatov would have spread at least as widely as the quote itself.

*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Cover photo: sergeidovlatov.com