Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ( /soʊlʒəˈniːtsɨn/; Russian: Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, ; 11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian writer, dissident and activist. He helped to raise global awareness of the gulag and the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system from 1918 to 1956. While his writings were often suppressed, he wrote several books most notably The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, two of his best-known works. "For the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the Soviet system had collapsed.