RUSSIA: 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 Soviet prison camps, 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. The dacha featured in the tumultuous relationship between the writer and his ex-wife Natalya Reshetovskaya, who died two years ago aged 84.
Ms Reshetovskaya and a journalist, Nikolai Ledovskikh, had planned to open a museum to the writer's work in the dacha, and since her death the home had passed into Ledovskikh's hands.