On October 8, 1970, one of Russia's best-known contemporary writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. A leading writer and critic of Soviet internal oppression, he was awarded the prize, the Nobel committee wrote, "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."
Born in 1918 in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 for criticizing the Stalin regime, and served eight years in Russian prisons and labor camps. Upon his release in 1953, he was sent into “internal exile” in Asiatic Russia, during which time he began secretly writing. After Stalin’s death, Solzhenitsyn was released from his exile and began writing openly.
His first publication, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963), appeared in the somewhat less repressive atmosphere of Nikita Khrushchev’s regime (1955-1964). The book was widely read in both Russia and the West, and its harsh criticisms of Stalinist repression provided a dramatic insight into the Soviet system.
Eventually, however, Soviet officials clamped down on Solzhenitsyn and other Russian artists, and henceforth his works had to be secreted out of Russia in order to be published. These works included Cancer Ward (1968) and the massive three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 (1973-1978). The Soviet government further demonstrated its displeasure over Solzhenitsyn’s writings by preventing him from personally accepting his Nobel Prize in 1970. In 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union for treason, and he moved to the United States.
Although celebrated as a symbol of anticommunist resistance, Solzhenitsyn was also extremely critical of many aspects of American society; particularly what he termed its incessant materialism. He returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure in Moscow on August 3, 2008. He was 89.
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