Metropolitan Tryphon (1861-1934)
"Oh, how many ideas and works had perished in that building--a whole lost culture? Oh, soot, soot, from the Lubyanka chimneys!"--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In one of his most famous works, The Gulag Archipelago, the Russian author and Nobel Laureate in Literature Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn laments all the great works of human thought and culture that were destroyed by Soviet authorities. The interrogators would burn many of the papers they found on the persons of their prisoners. That was the fate of the Solzhenitsyn's own War Diary. He mentions other such destructions: one man had formulated an alphabet and vocabulary for the Yeniseian languages, and with his work's annihilation came the removal of an entire nationality's written language for decades. Another man was a great engineer, and his papers were taken from his wife and eradicated as well. Solzhenitsyn's lament over the destruction of so much culture.
