Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison camp system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature for the ethical force with which he pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature. Arrested in 1945 while serving as a Red Army captain for criticizing Joseph Stalin in private correspondence, he spent eight years in the Gulag and internal exile, an experience that shaped his novels, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and the three volume nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago (1973), which sold tens of millions of copies. Stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1974 and exiled to the West, he lived in Vermont for nearly two decades before his citizenship was restored in 1990 and he returned to Russia in 1994.