The Dovlatov House

In brief, if you are standing outside. This is an apartment house of the St Petersburg Merchants’ Board; the design was commissioned from the architect Alexander Baryshnikov in 1911. Six storeys, three wings, six main stairwells and a cour d’honneur, rare for the city — an open formal courtyard instead of a well. People live here: entrances with intercoms, residents’ cars by the gates, lights in the windows. You can get inside with the museum tour of apartment 34 — an hour, 993 ₽, daily at 11:00, meeting at the monument.

The building has been under state protection since 1997 — and not as the Dovlatov House. In the register of KGIOP, the city’s heritage committee, it is listed as «The House Where John Reed Lived in 1917»: a cultural heritage site of regional significance, 23 Rubinstein Street, Building A. The American journalist occupied apartment 36 here in the days of the revolution — one floor above the flat the Dovlatovs would move into almost thirty years later. One staircase, two writers, both tied to New York.

At the end of the nineteenth century the plot between the Fontanka and Troitskaya Street belonged to the St Petersburg Merchants’ Society. The Board twice tried to build on it on a grand scale: in 1904 it announced a competition for an apartment house with a theatre hall — fourteen designs, five prizes — and in 1910 the journal «Zodchy» published a sketch by Nikolai Vasilyev with an openwork railing separating the courtyard from the street. Neither scheme was built.

In 1911 the design was commissioned from Alexander Baryshnikov, a civil engineer and graduate of the Institute of Railway Engineers. KGIOP describes the result with restraint: «in the forms of Art Nouveau with the use of classical decorative elements». Put simply, it is Art Nouveau with a measure of calm classicism mixed in: a stuccoed façade, bay windows, balconies — and the cour d’honneur, the formal courtyard that sets the building apart from its neighbours.

The street had a different name then. It was Golovin Lane in the 1730s, Troitsky Lane from 1798, Troitskaya Street from 1821, and became Rubinstein Street only in 1929 — for the centenary of the composer, who lived on the same street, at No. 38.

A small tower with a clock and a bell stood at the centre of the courtyard. The clock struck for the whole yard, and people grew so used to it that they no longer heard it even at night. Around 1982 some teenagers lit a fire in the attic; the firefighters, putting out the blaze, threw the tower down, and the bell cracked. It was never rebuilt. That is how the courtyard lost its voice — and in every modern photograph of the house it is already gone.

From the start the house drew a particular breed of tenant: professors, doctors, engineers, actors, writers. The list is long and almost implausible for a single address.

• John Reed — apartment 36, 1917–1918. It is on his account that the house was placed under state protection. A caveat is in order: the widespread claim that «Ten Days That Shook the World» was written here is not borne out by the documents — Reed wrote the book once back in America.
• Arkady Raikin — apartment 79. The family moved in in 1922 and stayed until the evacuation from besieged Leningrad in 1942.
• Ivan Yefremov — palaeontologist and science-fiction writer, author of «Thais of Athens», lived in apartment 4 from 1921 to 1935, until he left for Moscow.
• Alexandra Brushtein — playwright, author of «The Road Goes Off into the Distance»; lived in the house with her husband, a doctor.
• Sergei Dovlatov — apartment 34, from 1944. The family took two rooms in a seven-room communal flat; he moved in here as a three-year-old after the evacuation, and it is the longest address of his life.

The breed has not died out: today the house’s residents include, among others, Alexander Druz.

Of the house’s eighty-odd apartments, the museum occupies part of one. Apartment 34 was designed for a single family — 220 square metres, seven rooms. In 1920 it was ‘consolidated’ in the Soviet manner, and one family became seven. It has been communal ever since: the same shared corridor, the same kitchen for everyone, the same two lavatories.

What survives is what usually disappears first: the tiled stove that Dovlatov stoked and by which Brodsky and Rein sat, the peephole drilled in the door by the writer himself, the house register with the names of the neighbours — the future characters of «Ours». The neighbours here are not former ones: some of the rooms are still lived in. The museum opened in 2022 without anyone being rehoused — an exceedingly rare case of an exhibition and residents sharing one flat.

The Sergei Dovlatov Museum-Apartment — in detail, with a floor plan and the rooms →

The memorial plaque was unveiled on 3 September 2007 by decree of the St Petersburg city government; it was designed by the artist Alexei Arkhipov. It reads: «The writer Sergei Dovlatov lived in this house from 1944 to 1975».

The monument came nine years later — on 4 September 2016, for the writer’s 75th anniversary, during the «D Day» festival. Dovlatov stands full-length by a door, with a table and a typewriter beside him; the sculptor is Vyacheslav Bukhaev. His widow Elena and daughter Katherine came from New York for the unveiling.

More about the monument — who made it, what it shows and how it differs from the plaque — on a separate page. The monument is also the meeting point: tours start there, not at the entrance — so that guests do not crowd the stairwell of a residential building.

In December 2025 a major renovation of the house was completed. The historic look of the façade was restored: the balconies, the lost decorative elements, the stucco, the metal flag holders and the railings of the street gate; the downpipes were painted to match the façade. So the house guests see today is closer to Baryshnikov’s design than the house Dovlatov saw.

Everything else is as it was. This is not a museum quarter or a restored mansion with a ticket desk on the ground floor, but a residential building in the city centre: intercoms, prams in the stairwell, notices about the owners’ meeting. The only door that opens for guests is the door of apartment 34, and only by booking.

From outside, the house can be viewed freely and free of charge: the façade, the cour d’honneur, the monument, the plaque. There is only one legitimate way in — a museum tour, because people live behind every other door.

• Museum tour — apartment 34, about an hour, 993 ₽. Daily at 11:00, and from 1 September also at 16:30.
• «Secrets of Leningrad Communal Apartments» — three communal flats in one outing, Dovlatov’s as the finale, about two hours, 1295 ₽.
• «No goodbyes — call me!» — an evening immersive performance with actors right in the flat, 1695 ₽.
• «What have I earned?» — a play based on «The Suitcase» in those very rooms, 2495 ₽.
• Private visit — the flat for your party alone, from 10 000 ₽.

Address: 23 Rubinstein Street, St Petersburg. Dostoevskaya and Vladimirskaya metro stations are a seven-minute walk away. Meeting point at the Dovlatov monument. Choose a date · how to get there and visiting rules.