Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Russian novelist and dissident
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author and Soviet dissident who helped the world learn about the Gulag labor camp system.
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Born 1918 in Kislovodsk, Russia Died 2008
About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and died in 2008. As an army captain in World War II, he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in private letters and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag, followed by internal exile. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He published his debut novel in 1962, under the title One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago, available here as The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, was first published in 1973 and sold tens of millions of copies. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994.