Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Former Cottage Destroyed by Fire

Posted on October 19, 2005

The Guardian reports that the former dacha or country cottage where Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote some of his most famous works was destroyed by fire. Tragically, part of the family's archives of the writer's works were lost in the fire.

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 owner of the property had plans to turn the cottage into a museum of the writer's works, but it never happened. One would think that all writings, photographs and memorabilia of Solzhenitsyn would have already been in a museum or bank vault for safekeeping.