Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008
Russian writer and Soviet dissident whose The Gulag Archipelago exposed the Soviet labour-camp system; Nobel Prize in Literature 1970.
Biography
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer in the Second World War and was arrested in 1945 for criticising Stalin in private letters. He spent eight years in labour camps and then internal exile.
Under Khrushchev's thaw his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962 and made him famous. His later works, including Cancer Ward and The First Circle, circulated only in samizdat or abroad. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.
After The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the Soviet camp system, appeared in Paris in 1973, he was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He lived mostly in Vermont, where he wrote a long cycle of novels on the Russian Revolution, and returned to Russia in 1994. He died in Moscow in 2008.
Affiliations
Education
- Southern Federal University studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University (now Southern Federal University)
