Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, (1918- ). Russian novelist. A former schoolteacher, he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in 1945 and spent eight years in prison. On his release he began to write. His first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), set in a forced labour camp, was extremely successful. However, the political nature of his novels brought Solzhenitsyn increasingly into official disfavor and from 1964 he published his works abroad. His later novels include Cancer Ward (1968) and The First Circle (1968). Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago (1973), which exposes the Russian concentration camp system. After two years in Switzerland he moved to Vermont, USA, where he devoted himself to work on The Red Wheel, a multi-volume novel about the Russian Revolution that remains incomplete. In 1991 the Soviet authorities dropped all the charges against him; he returned to his homeland three years later.
