On the Other in Aleksei German Jr.’s film Dovlatov

This article examines the problem of identity as portrayed in the 2018 film Dovlatov, a line of inquiry partly prompted by the publication of an interview with its director Aleksei German Jr. in The Art and Science of Television journal (German et al., 2025). While analyzing the director’s work, the authors of this publication noticed the recurring term “other” in critical reviews of the film and decided to focus on it as a semantic trigger, through which to explore the identity of the film’s protagonist and German Jr.’s alter ego—since the director himself described Dovlatov as having a “particularly personal resonance” for him [Goldmann]. Drawing on various interpretations of the Other, the authors propose their own understanding, distinguishing three types of human individuality: • The Self—analogous to the “I”; • The Other—the opposite of the “I”; • The Alien—the antagonist in a mutually exclusive conflict between the “Other” and the “I.” These three human hypostases, each in its own way, reveal the problematic nature of Dovlatov’s character. The last of them—the Alien—illuminates his relationship with the bureaucratic system of the 1970s. This system manifested itself on the one hand in its traditional form (Dovlatov as a specific Alien to the system), and on the other, in an inversion where the system itself became a generalized Alien to him. This interpretation of the writer’s cinematic image as a problematic Self–Other–Alien, in its most essential dimensions, makes it possible to offer a prospective (re) interpretation of the film’s conceptual framework.