Sergei Dovlatov’s flat at 23 Rubinstein Street

In brief, if you came here from a search. Yes, this is that very flat: 23 Rubinstein Street, apartment 34, St Petersburg — Sergei Dovlatov lived here from 1944 to 1975. Today it houses a museum, and it is still a lived-in communal flat: people live behind the neighbouring doors. So you can get inside by advance booking only — there is no entry from the street and no walk-in visiting.

This is a museum of the communal flat in the literal sense of the word. The shortest way in is the museum tour: about an hour, 993 ₽, daily at 11:00, and from 1 September also at 16:30. No prepayment, payment at the meeting point. Choose a date.

No. 23 Rubinstein Street is the Merchants’ Board apartment house, designed by the civil engineer Alexander Baryshnikov in 1911. The building still does what it was built for: people live in it. This is worth understanding in advance — you are not going into a building-as-exhibit but into a stairwell that smells of someone else’s dinner.

Nevsky, Five Corners and the Fontanka are close by. In a hundred years Rubinstein Street has been bohemian, communal and a bar street — and it is still the most literary street in the city: Tolstoy House is a stone’s throw away, as are the addresses we cover on a separate walk.

For the writer’s 85th anniversary Komsomolskaya Pravda called Rubinstein the main Dovlatov street, and Anastasia Printseva, director of the «D Day» festival, explained to the paper why: Dovlatov would step out into the street «as if into his own corridor» — even in autumn, in corduroy slippers on bare feet and a towelling dressing gown, he would walk to the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky. At the bus stop they knew him: people came up to swap manuscripts, repay money or borrow it — a salon without walls or a sign, which began at this front door.

Communal apartment 34 is seven rooms, a shared kitchen, a shared corridor and a shared telephone. The Dovlatov family — the mother, Nora Sergeevna, and Sergei — occupied two of the seven rooms from 1944; Sergei lived here until 1975. The rest belonged to the neighbours, whom Dovlatov later rehoused across the pages of «Ours» and his notebooks — their stories are collected separately.

The museum holds the house register — the record of the flat’s residents, with surnames and dates of moving in and out. It is the most convincing exhibit: literature in one room, its documentary proof in the next. Some rooms have been restored from residents’ recollections: Dovlatov’s room, Smirnova’s room, the room of the artist Mileant.

The display is assembled like an inventory: seven objects, each with a story. The door peephole Dovlatov cut himself — to look from the room into the corridor without opening the door. The wall telephone — one for everyone, with a queue and eavesdropping. The «Underwood» typewriter — the make that gave its name to Dovlatov’s notebooks, «Solo on an Underwood». The door with the note «do not wake after the shift», found under layers of paint.

The tiled stove — still working: here Dovlatov received Brodsky and Rein, and warmth was shared just like everything else. The «Latvia» radiogram — valve-driven and in working order: one station played for the whole flat at once. And the communal chest — genuine, from this very flat: chests like this held the little that was truly one’s own.

The stove has a second story too, and it is not about guests. As Elena Dovlatova recalls, in the heat of a quarrel Dovlatov threw his manuscripts into the fire, and she pulled them out. The stove stands in the same place.

Everything here can be touched. That is a matter of principle: not a museum behind glass but a flat where things go on working as things.

Real neighbours live behind the walls of the museum rooms. That is why visits are by booking only, groups are small, and evening programmes end at a decent hour. In return you get what no reconstruction can give: a communal flat that is not pretending to be one.

Among St Petersburg’s writers’ museum-apartments — Pushkin’s on the Moika, Dostoevsky’s in Kuznechny Lane, Akhmatova’s in the Fountain House, Brodsky’s in «A Room and a Half» — ours is the only one that has remained lived in. How that came about and why we keep it that way — on the page about the museum.

Daily at 11:00, and from 1 September also at 16:30 — the museum tour: an hour alone with apartment 34, 993 ₽. If you want context — the grand tour «Secrets of Leningrad Communal Apartments»: two hours and three flats, 1295 ₽. In the evening the flat performs: the immersive tour «No goodbyes — call me!» and the play «What have I earned?», based on «The Suitcase». Groups take the flat to themselves.

Booking is on the home page and takes two minutes. Tours have no prepayment: it is a request, not a payment. The play and the immersive tour take a 20 % prepayment. Who Dovlatov is and which book to start with — in a short guide to his life and books. Which other museum-apartments in St Petersburg are still lived in — in a separate guide.