Moscow Times on new Solzhenitsyn museum

In today’s Moscow Times, Emily Couch describes her visit to the new museum off Tverskaya Street, in the apartment where Solzhenitsyn lived and from which he was led away to his second arrest (and expulsion to the West) on 12 February 1974.

“The museum is a veritable shrine to the great Russian author, featuring everything from the jacket he wore in the Kazakhstan prison camp to copies of his children’s homework that he, himself, corrected.

It is comprised of seven rooms, each representing a different period of Solzhenitsyn’s life. Aside from the necessary additions of information plaques and glass cases, the apartment has been left much as it was during his lifetime. The final room, representing the author’s return to Russia in the 1990s, has a photograph showing the author sitting at the desk looking much the same now as it did then. The entrance hall from which the author was arrested, Dasha noted, still boasts the original parquet flooring. ”