The article discusses the intertextual field of Sergei Dovlatov’s novel “The Foreigner” and establishes a correlation between the heroine Mary Tatarovich and the hero of the whole prose Boris (Alikhanov - Dovlatov - Dalmato,). In some examples, the article shows that these characters - characters-twins, female and male variant of the invariant, both the alter ego of the author. Unlike previous interpretations of the story, the emphasis is not on the stylistic features of the writer’s narrative style, but on the figurative system of the story, which is not inferior to other texts and is included in the single metatext of Dovlatov’s prose.