Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, in the northern Caucasus, six months after his father’s death, and was brought up by his mother in Rostov-on-Don. He studied mathematics and physics at Rostov University while taking correspondence courses in literature, and in the Second World War served as an artillery officer, rising to the rank of captain. In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, he was arrested for criticising Stalin in private letters and sentenced to eight years in the labour camps.

He served part of his term in a special prison research institute — the setting of In the First Circle — and part as a manual labourer at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, followed by internal exile, during which he was successfully treated for cancer in Tashkent. In 1962, with Khrushchev’s approval, the journal Novy Mir published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first Soviet work to depict the camps openly; it caused a sensation. Within a few years the political climate hardened. Cancer Ward and In the First Circle were refused publication in the Soviet Union and appeared abroad, and he was expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1969. His work revived the moral seriousness of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, centred on conscience under extreme pressure.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, he declined to travel to Stockholm for fear of not being allowed to return. The publication in Paris of The Gulag Archipelago, a vast ‘experiment in literary investigation’ of the Soviet camp system, led to his arrest and expulsion in 1974. He lived for many years in Vermont, working on The Red Wheel, his multi-volume cycle on the revolution. His Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990, and he returned to Russia in 1994. He died in Moscow in 2008.