Aleksandr Soljenítsin

Nobel Prize in Literature 1970

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, in the Caucasus, on November 11, 1918. He fought in World War II and was imprisoned and interned in forced labor camps from 1945 to 1953 after privately criticizing Stalin. Acquitted following the "opening" created by Khrushchev's famous speech denouncing Stalinist crimes, he became a teacher and began his writing career in the 1950s. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, classified by Aleksandr Tvardovski, its editor at the magazine Novy MirIn 1962, its publication was expressly authorized by Khrushchev and it was studied in schools, as a "classic." But Solzhenitsyn's life as a writer would be turbulent and repressed in the wake of the Writers' Union's refusal to publish it. Cancer Patients' Pavilion and the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Shortly after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago In Paris, in 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union, living in Switzerland, France, and the United States until the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which he returned to Moscow in 1994, where he was triumphantly received. He died on August 3, 2008. His works indelibly mark 20th-century Russian literature, forming part of the great narrative tradition of names like Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.