The front door, upholstered in brown leatherette for warmth and soundproofing, is nothing out of the ordinary, just the same as thousands of similar doors in Moscow during the 1960s and 1970s.
Memorial plaque on the house with the inscription:
Here from 1962 to 1975 lived and worked Hero of Socialist Labor, People's Artist of the USSR, composer Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich
The doorbell makes a shrill, “wheezy” sound. Melodic doorbell ringtones did not appear until much later.
The letterbox on the door with a slot for delivering newspapers and magazines, subscribed to in advance (usually for a year or six months), is a typical attribute of Soviet daily life.
Every morning and evening, the postman would make his rounds of the apartments and drop letters and newspapers into the narrow slot in every door.
What did the Shostakovich family subscribe to besides Pravda and Izvestia, newspapers that were a must for Soviet citizens? Naturally their choice extended to Zvezda, Oktyabr and Novy Mir, so-called thick journals.
An approximate list of the newspapers Shostakovich subscribed to can be found in a short letter the composer wrote to his secretary Rita Kornblum from the House of Composers in Staraya Ruza, where he spent his holiday in the winter of 1972:
“Rita Emmanuilovna! Please send Sovetsky Sport, Ogonyok, Smena, Vechernyaya Moskva, Moskovskaya Pravda, Leninskoye Znamya, Moskovsky Komsomolets and TV and Radio to me here. Only send the newspapers that have crossword puzzles in them. This does not apply to Sovetsky Sport...”
An avid football fan, Shostakovich was also fond of doing crossword puzzles. Newspaper crossword puzzles filled in by the composer are kept among his private papers.
A narrow corridor with the indispensable attributes of an entrance hall—a mirror and a coat rack attached to the wall—leads to the reception room.