The service is to receive widespread coverage in the state-controlled media, but in interviews, young people said they would not pay much attention to it. Approached at a park in Moscow, Taisiya Gunicheva, 17, a college student, said she had heard of Mr. Solzhenitsyn, but could not name any of his books. She said his work was largely absent from her school curriculum. "Can you imagine, there is nothing about it at all," she said. "It is sad, but unfortunately, it's true."

Nearby was Anton Zimin, 26, an advertising copywriter, who said he was quite familiar with Mr. Solzhenitsyn but doubted that others in his generation were. He said people his age had lost touch with the struggles of their parents and grandparents.

"The problem is that now, it's all about consumption -- this spirit that has engulfed everybody," Mr. Zimin said. "People prefer to consume everything, the simplest things, and the faster, the better. Books are something that force you to think, reading books requires some effort. But they prefer entertainment."

The publisher, which reissued the three volumes of the author's Gulag Archipelago--arguably Solzhenitsyn's most well known work--in 2007, had been planning a 2009 release date for Circle. That won't change, though the imprint may consider timing the release of First Circle to the anniversary of the author's death.

Harper Perennial publisher Carrie Kania said the imprint views the book as an important piece of modern literature and therefore wants "time to 'do it right.'" Kania is also hoping Circle--censored by Soviet authorities when it was first published in the former USSR in 1968--will result in more interest in Gulag Archipelago. According to Kania, the reissue of Gulag has been a steady seller; the three volumes, along with a fourth abridged single edition, have sold 25,000 copies in total over the last year.

Russian literary giant Alexander Solzhenitsyn, opened the eyes of the world to the brutality of Stalin's labour camps with searing writings that brought him the wrath of the Soviet authorities and years of persecution. He went from outcast to hero, in a life whose suffering and triumph reflected the upheavals of 20th century Russia itself.

Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, was a driven chronicler of Russian history, drawing on his blackest moments in dictator Josef Stalin's camps for his most memorable works. In a life of extraordinary swings of fortune, he served with the Red Army, endured eight years in the Soviet Gulag, beat cancer and in 1970, still hounded by the communist authorities, won the Nobel Prize for literature. He spent 20 years of unhappy and forced exile in the West whose materialistic values he never ceased to denounce.

By the time he made a hero's return to Russia in 1994, it was to a challenging new country that -- to his regret -- was espousing those same values and which he barely recognised. The sometimes Messianic figure, with the mien of a biblical prophet, was an icon of resistance to communism in the Cold War.

The dacha near the village of Rodzhestvo, outside Moscow, was acquired by Solzhenitsyn in 1965. The dissident retreated there after his expulsion from the Soviet Union Of Writers and wrote the seminal account of his time in the Soviet prison camps system, The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature in 1970 and returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994 after 20 years' exile.

An official at the local fire department said the dacha burned down on Wednesday night. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said it was being rented by a Georgian man and that faulty electrics had sparked the blaze. It was unclear how much of the writer's old papers remained there, although the newspaper said there were rare photographs and writings about the writer's life.