Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(b. 1928)

After receiving degrees in mathematics and physics from Rostov University in Russia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was drafted into the Soviet Union's Red Army and served as an artillery officer during World War II. Toward the end of the war, the secret police intercepted a letter he had sent to a friend in which he criticized the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin. He was arrested and received eight years in prison, followed by permanent exile. He spent the first four years working as a mathematician in a prison in Moscow and the next four years working in a labor camp as a bricklayer and construction worker. In 1953, Solzhenitsyn was released from prison and spent three years of enforced exile in a remote Asian town working as a teacher. While living there, he almost died from cancer. He was treated for his illness, however, and recovered.

Toward the end of his time in exile, Solzhenitsyn began to write again. His writing was not recognized until 1963 when his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich–the story of an inmate in a Soviet labor camp–was published. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, he was not permitted to leave the Soviet Union to accept the award. Four years later, Solzhenitsyn was banished from his country for his controversial writing, particularly his book The Gulag Archipelago (1973). He eventually settled in the United States, but he moved back to Russia in 1994 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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