Downtown Cavendish, Vt.
“Exile is always difficult, and yet I could not have imagined a better place to live, and wait for my return home, than Cavendish, Vermont.’’
— Russian novelist, historian, short story writer (and Nobel laureate) and anti-Soviet political activist Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) in a 1994 letter to the Town of Cavendish. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned in 1994, after that empire fell apart, in 1991.
From dartblog.com:
An article in Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ magazine, “A Tiny Village in Vermont Was the Perfect Spot to Hide Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,’’ describes Solzhenitsyn’s time in Vermont.
After traveling throughout the region in 1975, they decided Cavendish would be their new home. Its small size (population: 1,264 in 1970) meant that privacy wouldn’t be a problem. Its remote location was far away from reporters, fans, and the Soviet security services. And its proximity to Dartmouth College provided easy access to a wealth of library and research resources. The entire family, including Natalia’s mother, Ekaterina, moved to a large wooded property there in 1976 [where they stayed until 1994].
