Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1918 – 2008

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author whose work helped expose the political repression of the Stalinist era to a global audience. After eight years in the Gulag for criticizing Stalin in private correspondence, he drew on memory and clandestine interviews to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the three-volume nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago, which sold tens of millions of copies and "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state." He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature and was forcibly exiled in 1974 before returning to Russia after the Soviet collapse.

Last checked: May 10, 2026, 1:06 PM