Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center — Biography

On August 3, 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and Nobel Prize for Literature winner (1970), died at the age of 89. An excerpt from the article:

"Winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, Russia. He studied mathematics at Rostov University, while at the same time taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History.

During World War II, he served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Soviet Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was thrice decorated for personal heroism. In 1945 he was arrested for criticising Stalin in private correspondence and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile. The experience of the camps provided him with raw material for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which he was permitted to publish in 1962. It would remain his only major work to appear in his motherland until 1990.

Solzhenitsyn’s exile was cut short by Khrushchev’s reforms, allowing him to return from Kazakhstan to central Russia in 1956. He taught mathematics, astronomy and physics at a high school while continuing to write. In the early 1960s he was allowed to publish, in addition to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, only four stories, and by 1969 he was expelled from the Writers’ Union. The publication in the West of the initial version of August 1914 (the first part of The Red Wheel) and of Gulag Archipelago soon brought retaliation from the Soviet authorities. In February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and flown against his will to Frankfurt, West Germany."