Centenary …

… Untethered | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as he saw himself. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Solzhenitsyn, at long last, found his writer’s refuge up a winding road from the town of Cavendish, Vermont. There, he expanded and winterized a Swiss-style wooden house and erected a tower for his library, archives and, on the top floor, multiple tables, where he worked standing up because of sciatica. An underground tunnel connected the two structures. “Now,” he writes, “I had the office of my dreams, spacious, with a high ceiling and bright windows (there were even windows in the roof, and no attic beneath them).” The compound, which he christened “Five Brooks”, also acquired an interior chapel dedicated to St Sergius of Radonezh. The author swam, played tennis, scythed grass and sawed wood, while contemplating the past and future of Russia in “the American wilderness”.