biography
| name: |
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander (Isayevich)
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pronunciation:
[solzhenitsin]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1918– )
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| biography:
| Writer, born in Kislovodsk, SW Russia. Educated at Rostov in mathematics and physics, he fought in World War 2, and was imprisoned (1945–53) for unfavourable comment on Stalin's conduct of the war. On his release, he became a teacher, and started to write. His first novel (trans titles), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), set in a prison camp, was acclaimed both in the USSR and the West; but his subsequent denunciation of Soviet censorship led to the banning of his later, semi-autobiographical novels, Cancer Ward (1968) and The First Circle (1968). He was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union in 1969, and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 (received in 1974). His later books include The Gulag Archipelago (1973–8), a factual account of the Stalinist terror, for which he was arrested and exiled (1974), and Invisible Allies (1996). He lived in the USA, where he became a US citizen in 1974 and in 1975 an honorary fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. He was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983, and the Russian State Literature Prize in 1990. He returned to Russia in 1994, and the following year published The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century. |
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