Rubinstein Street

This guide to Rubinstein Street in Saint Petersburg centers on the writer Sergei Dovlatov, who shuffled out of number twenty-three in his bathrobe with his fox terrier through the nineteen sixties and seventies, sharing the building with a science-fiction novelist and a famous comedian. His stories were too honest about drunkenness and bureaucracy to get published at home, and in 1978 he left for New York and never returned alive. Best heard while standing across from number twenty-three itself.