The Sergei Dovlatov Monument in St Petersburg

The address is 23 Rubinstein Street, on the odd-numbered side. The monument stands on the pavement in front of the house, to the left of the gates leading into the courtyard. From across the street you can see it in full, together with the façade.

The nearest metro stations are Vladimirskaya and Dostoevskaya, which open onto the same square: from there it is about four hundred metres, a six- or seven-minute walk. Note that Dostoevskaya’s own exit is open only on weekdays from 7:00 to 20:00 — at weekends and late in the evening you exit through Vladimirskaya; the two stations are linked by a passage. From Zvenigorodskaya it is about ten minutes along Zagorodny via Five Corners. If you are coming from Nevsky, the street starts right off the prospekt, and No. 23 is about halfway along.

You can look and take photographs freely, at any hour: this is a city street, not museum grounds. The monument is lit in the evening. In the morning the street is empty — the best time to shoot without passers-by in the frame.

Dovlatov stands full-length in a doorway — not on a pedestal but at pavement level, so you can have your photograph taken beside him without craning your neck. The writer was one metre ninety-four tall; the bronze figure is comparable, and that is the first thing guests notice.

The composition is made up of several parts. The bronze door bears the number 34: the number of that very communal flat. Beside it, a letterbox and sheets with quotations. By the door stand a writing desk with an «Underwood» and three granite stools — you may sit on them; the sculptor said so himself. The base and the stools are Baltic granite and gabbro-diabase; the bronze is patinated.

Under the desk stands Glasha the fox terrier — the Dovlatovs’ dog, who left with the family for New York. Bukhaev added the figure, cut from sheet steel, on 3 September 2021, for the writer’s 80th anniversary. It is easy to miss: you have to bend down to see it.

The sculptor is Vyacheslav Bukhaev, an architect and the author of the monuments to Akhmatova and Sobchak. He knew Dovlatov personally: they met in Leningrad at the sculpture works, where Dovlatov was a moulder. «Tall, sort of sad, went by Seryozha,» Bukhaev recalled. «I didn’t know his surname back then.» The monument took three and a half years and six sketches, among them one with the writer seated. The doorway was chosen to show his height: «he stands in the doorway, and the doorway is too tight for him».

The monument was unveiled on 4 September 2016, for the 75th anniversary of the writer’s birth, during the first «D Day» festival. His widow Elena Dovlatova and daughter Katherine came from New York for the unveiling. It was paid for privately: the idea and the funding came from the businessman Dmitry Nikitin, with no city money in the project.

Getting it approved was not easy. Under city rules, a decision to erect a monument is taken no sooner than thirty years after the person’s death, and Dovlatov died in 1990. The first site — the small park at the corner of Rubinstein Street and Grafsky Lane — was also rejected because it lies in a protected zone where new sculptural compositions may not be installed. In the summer of 2016 the «D Day» organisers collected signatures: the historian Lev Lurie online, Sergei Boyarsky on the street. On 31 August Governor Georgy Poltavchenko approved the installation as an exception — four days before the unveiling.

They did not quite make the date: the monument was assembled on the night before 4 September, without a foundation and with some elements missing. On 26 September the composition was taken down and carried off to the workshop, and on 8 October it was brought back — now with a foundation, the door, the desk and the «Underwood»; on 11 October it was finally set in place. So the monument guests see today spent the first three weeks of its life unfinished.

Nine years earlier, on 3 September 2007, a memorial plaque had appeared on the house — by decree of the St Petersburg city government, to a design by the artist Aleksei Arkhipov. It reads: «The writer Sergei Dovlatov lived in this house from 1944 to 1975». The plaque hangs on the façade, the monument stands by the gates; the two are often confused, but they are two different stories and two different authors.

The monument is our meeting point. Guests gather here, not in the stairwell: the house is residential, and crowding the entrance outside other people’s doors would be discourteous to the neighbours.

The monument is where the museum tour starts — daily at 11:00 and 16:30, one hour, 993 ₽ — as well as the evening formats: the immersive «No goodbyes — call me!», the play «What have I earned?» and «Dovlatov’s Communal Salon». The big tour of three communal flats is the only one that starts elsewhere, at Zvenigorodskaya metro station.

In the courtyard, on the third floor, is communal apartment 34, where Dovlatov lived from 1944 to 1975. It is still lived in: people live behind the neighbouring doors, and ordinary life goes on in the kitchen. It is the only genuine writer’s flat in Russia you can walk into — but only by booking, and in a small group.

The house itself — the 1912 Merchants’ Board apartment house, its history and its residents — has a page of its own.

The monument stands in the middle of the city’s most literary street. A hundred metres away is Tolstoy House (15–17 Rubinstein Street), famous for Lidval’s through-courtyards. In the other direction, three minutes along Zagorodny, is Five Corners with its flatiron building and turret. Three minutes more and you reach Vladimirsky Cathedral, open from eight in the morning, admission free.

The full route through Dovlatov’s addresses — from the Muruzi House and the «Saigon» corner to 23 Rubinstein Street — is collected in the guide «Dovlatov’s Places». For the street itself, house by house, see «Rubinstein Street».