Now the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve has got one more branch - the Memorial Flat of Vasily Belov located in Vologda. The decree establishing it was signed by museum director M.N. Sharomazov on September 4. Personal belongings of the writer will be exhibited there. At present everything is being prepared for an opening ceremony scheduled for October 21. It will be timed to the anniversary of Vasily Belov’s birth and will become one of the significant events of 2015 announced the Year of Literature in Russia.
It is worth reminding that in late 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed the Ministry of Culture of the RF to found the Memorial Flat of Vasily Belov. “To consider and to report”, such brief instructions were written on the documents regarding this issue. An opportunity to integrate the memorial flat into the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve as a branch was considered at the same time. The flat in which the famous writer lived was bought from his widow Olga Sergeevna Belova thanks to the means of the federal budget.
Vasily Ivanovich Belov is a Russian writer and publicist. He was born into a peasant family in the village of Timonikha of the Vologda region. His first works were published when he served in the army in Leningrad – his verses were published in the newspaper of the Leningrad Military District. Returning to his small Motherland, Vasily Belov worked in the district newspaper “Kommunar”. In 1959, he entered Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. Graduating from it, he moved to Vologda. In 1963, he became a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR.
It was the novelet “Business As Usual” published in 1966 that made Vasily Belov famous. It was followed by “Carpenter Tales” and “Vologda Bukhtinas”. He wrote about the village in his works. Later on, along with Fyodor Abramov and Valentin Rasputin, the writer was recognized as the most prominent representative of “village prose” – a direction in the Russian literature that originated in the middle of the 20th century. Vasily Belov was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1981 and the Russian Federation State Prize in the sphere of literature and art in 2003. The writer died after an extended illness on December 4, 2012.
