Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer born in Kislovodsk on December 11, 1918. He was the son of a Cossack land owner and teacher and was educated at the University of Rostov.

From 1941 to 1945 he fought in World War II in the Soviet Army and afterward was sentenced to eight years in prison for anti-Stalinist remarks that he wrote in a letter to a friend. Exiled to central Russia, he taught mathematics and wrote. His prison experiences were the background for his first novel, 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' (1962).

In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union for speaking against the government censorship that had suppressed some of his writings. Many of his novels have since been given English translations and in 1971, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his works.

Continuously harassed by Soviet authorities, Solzhenitsyn was deported to West Germany and deprived of his Soviet citizenship in 1974. After this, he settled in the US. His massively documented expose of the Soviet prison system, terrorism and secret police, first published in France appeared shortly afterward in English as the Gulag Archipelago.

In 1990, Solzhenitsyn's Russian citizenship was restored to him and shortly after he returned to his home country with his wife, Natalia while their three grown sons stayed behind in the US.

From then until his death in 2008, he lived with his wife in west Moscow. Solzhenitsyn expressed much distaste with the state of post-Soviet Russia and how he felt that it had gotten away from traditional Russian culture.

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure at the age of 89 on August 3, 2008. He was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery in a place that he had chosen. World leaders from Russia and many other countries paid tribute to the author after his death.