Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Russian Nobel Laureate and Gulag Chronicler Dies

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist and historian. Born on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, he served as an artillery officer in World War II.

He was arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin in a private letter and spent eight years in prison camps. His novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) described camp life, and The Gulag Archipelago exposed the Soviet prison system to the world. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.

He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and lived in Vermont until returning to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on August 3, 2008, at age 89.

Achievements: Nobel Prize in Literature (1970), author of The Gulag Archipelago.

Birth: December 11, 1918 - Kislovodsk, Russia.

Profession: Author.

Interesting Facts: He lived in exile in Vermont for 18 years.