Cultural Center "Alexander Solzhenitsyn Museum"

Stavropol Krai
Alexander Solzhenitsyn str., 3, Kislovodsk, Stavropol Territory
Phones: +7 985 850-03-84
Web site: goslitmuz.ru

The main subjects of the exhibition of the Information and Cultural Center "Museum of A. I. Solzhenitsyn": Kislovodsk in the 1910s, the history of the Solzhenitsyn family in the Stavropol region, the childhood and youth of the future world-famous writer, the trials of war, prison, camp and the rapid rise of literary fame in the early 1960s. The exhibition combines unique manuscripts, documents, photographs, memorial items and books from the archive of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and modern complexes of interactive materials. The museum has a rich collection of documentaries and interviews of Solzhenitsyn from different years.

The permanent exhibition of the museum is connected with Stavropol and the early biography of A. I. Solzhenitsyn. It tells about the formation of his personality in the years of childhood and youth, the tragic events of the war, followed by imprisonment and exile, about the beginning of writing-before the publication in 1962 of the novel "One Day of Ivan Denisovich", which brought the author world recognition. The further life and fate of the writer and outstanding figure of the twentieth century is variously presented in the multimedia content "The Museum of A. I. Solzhenitsyn".

The main memorial object of the Information and Cultural Center "Museum of A. I. Solzhenitsyn" in Kislovodsk is the building itself, which miraculously survived during the prohibition of Solzhenitsyn in the USSR (the house where he was born, located nearby, despite its undoubted architectural significance, was destroyed in the 1970s). In the late 1910s, the owner of the house was Maria Zakharovna Gorina, the sister of Taisiya Zakharovna Solzhenitsyn, the writer's mother. After the destruction of the family in the revolution, Taisiya Solzhenitsyn, who was widowed before the birth of her son, did not have a home of her own. The first two years of the future writer's life were spent in the house of her brother Roman, and in 1920 Taisiya Zakharovna moved to her sister Marusa. Here the Solzhenitsyns lived for four years, before leaving for Rostov-on-Don, where Alexander Solzhenitsyn went to school, then graduated from university, from where he went to the front. Solzhenitsyn subsequently visited Kislovodsk twice — after rehabilitation in the late 1950s and after a second rehabilitation, when he returned from exile in 1994.

The future writer carried his childhood shaky memories of this mansion in the old dacha district of Kislovodsk through all his wanderings: "The location of those rooms and houses where you live as a child is etched into your memory as one of the foundations of world existence, "Alexander Isaevich wrote in the epic"Red Wheel".

In 2020, the Solzhenitsyn Information and Cultural Center in Kislovodsk celebrated its fifth anniversary. In this short period of time, it has become one of the most important cultural objects of the city. The favorite brainchild of the museum is a circle on astronomy for schoolchildren, organized jointly with the staff of the branch of the Pulkovo Observatory.