Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, Nobel prize laureate and Russia's most celebrated living writer, was born December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk. In February 1945, as a youth captain in the Russian army, he was arrested by Soviet counterintelligence, who had discovered in his letters derogatory remarks about Stalin. Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in concentration camps and three years in exile for his offense--an experience that provided raw material for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle. In 1954 he underwent radiation therapy for treatment of cancer, which became the catalyst for his novel Cancer Ward, published in the late 1960s. In 1962, protected by Khrushchev's anti-Stalin campaign, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the Soviet Union. It reminas the only one of his works published in his native land. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970but was unable to attend the Nobel ceremony in Sweden for fear that he would be barred from returning to his family. In 1972, despite government-sponsored ostracism and the loss of most of the privileges afforded other Soviet writers, Solzhenitsyn produced August 1914--a masterful account of World War I--and the following year, in defiance of Soviet law, authorized the Western publication of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956. This so outraged the Soviet authorities that after waging a campaign of vilification against him, they stripped Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and on February 13, 1974, expelled him from Russia. He now lives with his family in Vermont and has since published his authobiography, The Oak and the Calf (1975), the acclaimed Lenin in Zurich (1975), the next two volumes in The Gulag Archipelago canon (in 1974 and 1976), a narrative poem Prussian Nights (1977), a revision of his Harvard University commencement address entitled A World Split Apart (1978), The Mortal Danger (1980), Victory Celebrations (1983), and plays Love Grild and the Innocent (1970) and Candle in the Wind (1974). He was awarded the Templeton prize in 1983.
Notes and Summaries
coming soon...
