Yury Dombrovsky: An arrest IN Myortviy Alley

The second paper of the Dombrovsky cycle, this publication continues the quest to reconstruct the writer’s biography and shed light on unknown events of his life. Using a wide range of materials, from reminiscences to rare OGPU records to fiction, the article narrates Dombrovsky’s odyssey through Stalin’s gulags: in particular, his four arrests, incarceration, time in labour camps and banishments, which robbed him of 20 years of his life altogether. The article is especially notable as it contains a hitherto unpublished criminal case file of 1932, previously in a restricted FSB [Federal Security Service] archive, and examines the versions of the writer’s first arrest. It appears some of the events were depicted in Dombrovsky’s novels, and fairly accurately too: with passages quoting extracts from the case file almost to the letter. It is remarkable that the young Dombrovsky’s case was investigated by the same secret police officer, ‘the executioner of Russian literature’, who was handling Osip Mandelstam’s first case, and was chief interrogator in the cases of Andrey Platonov, Nikolay Klyuev, Boris Pilnyak, and other writers.

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