Solzhenitsyn papers destroyed as old retreat goes up in flames

[emad]

FIRST Wallace & Grommit, now Solzhenitsyn.........



Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Tuesday October 18, 2005
The Guardian


A fire has destroyed the country cottage where Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the former Soviet dissident, wrote some of his most famous works and stored part of his family's archive.

The dacha near the village of Rodzhestvo, outside Moscow, was acquired by Solzhenitsyn in 1965. The dissident retreated there after his expulsion from the Soviet Union Of Writers and wrote the seminal account of his time in the Soviet prison camps system, The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature in 1970 and returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994 after 20 years' exile.


An official at the local fire department said the dacha burned down on Wednesday night. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said it was being rented by a Georgian man and that faulty electrics had sparked the blaze. It was unclear how much of the writer's old papers remained there, although the newspaper said there were rare photographs and writings about the writer's life.

The dacha was caught up in the tumultuous relationship between the writer and his ex-wife Natalya Reshetovskaya, who died two years ago aged 84.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1594722,00.html

[xchrom]

1. what a huge loss.

i was a huge solzhenitsyn fan -- his accounts of being in the gulag are revealing.

[etherealtruth]

2. "It was unclear how much of the writer's old papers remained there"

I hope the loss was minimal. I remember reading his accounts as an adolescent and being deeply moved by his spirit and the spirit of those around him.