About the Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was serving the Soviet Army in 1945 when he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, later cut short by Khrushchev's reforms. Although permitted to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union in 1969. The Western publication of his other novels, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, brought retaliation: in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and forcibly flown to Frankfurt. In 1991, the Soviet government dismissed treason charges against him, and Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994.