It so happened that Sergei Dovlatov was born and died far from the city he was accustomed to consider his hometown. He was born in 1941 in evacuation in Ufa, and died in exile in New York. And yet, most of his life was spent here, in an ordinary communal apartment on Rubinstein Street. The Dovlatovs occupied two rooms. In one lived Sergei Donatovich’s mother, and in the other, he himself. The communal apartment is still there today, and the room of the iconic author is now considered common and, they say, is rented out.

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