Unusual literary routes are available for tourists in the Caucasus

Every year tourists can enjoy new routes in the regions of the North Caucasus that are developed besides the already popular ones. For example, “Solzhenitsyn walk” has recently been held in Kislovodsk. This is a trip to the places which the writer visited in September 1994 – last time when he came to his small motherland.

The tradition of “Solzhenitsyn walk” started on September 3, 2009 – on the first death anniversary of the writer. At that time a small group of people gathered on the square in front of the Ordzhonikidze Sanatorium and, moving down Lenin Avenue, visited the miraculously preserved “Mansion of Gorina” – the house of Solzhenitsyn’s aunt, where little Sasha had been living with his mother until 1924. Later the dilapidated building with an elegant wooden tower had been restored and Russia’s first Solzhenitsyn Museum was opened there. About 50-70 people always gather to take part in the “walks”. The tour also includes a visit to a monument to the writer designed by Zurab Tsereteli in 2018.

This event gives an opportunity to know not only the most interesting facts about the Nobel Prize laureate’s life, but also what kind of person he was. You can learn all this from Rakhima Gochiyaeva, a tour guide, our researcher and a close friend of Solzhenitsyn who personally accompanied him on that trip to Kislovodsk 28 years ago. She reads selected passages from her personal correspondence with Aleksandr Isayevich during the “walks”.