Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Six months after the death of his father, an artillery officer in World War I, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, southern Russia. His mother, Taisiya Zakharovna Shcerbak, spoke English and French and encouraged his interest in literature and science. By age 19, he was writing chapters for a book about World War I. From 1936 to 1941, he studied at Rostov State University, earning degrees in mathematics and physics, while also taking correspondence courses in literature from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History.

During World War II, Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery captain in the Red Army, commanding a unit in major battles and receiving decorations for courage. In February 1945, while fighting in East Prussia, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police for criticizing Joseph Stalin in a private letter. He was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag prison camps, where he survived cancer and worked as a miner, bricklayer, and mathematician. After Stalin’s death, he was treated for cancer in Tashkent, an experience later fictionalized in Cancer Ward.

His first published work, the 1962 novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was allowed by Nikita Khrushchev and caused a sensation, exposing camp life. After Khrushchev’s fall in 1964, he faced repression. He smuggled manuscripts of The First Circle and Cancer Ward to the West. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but could not travel to receive it. His magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, published abroad in 1973, led to his arrest and exile in 1974. He lived in the United States until the collapse of the Soviet Union, returning to Russia in 1994 where he was fully recognized and his works widely published.

Solzhenitsyn was married twice. His first marriage was to Natalya Reshetovskaya, whom he wed on April 27, 1940; they divorced in November 1948. They remarried on February 2, 1957, but divorced again on July 22, 1972. In 1973, he married Natalia Svetlova, and they remained together until his death. He had three sons: Yermolai born 1970, Ignat born 1972, and Stephan born 1973. His wife and sons chose to remain American citizens even after Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. He lived in Cavendish, Vermont during his exile, and later was granted a house near Moscow.

Alongside Andrei Sakharov and Mstislav Rostropovich, Solzhenitsyn was a prominent dissident of the Soviet era. His works, especially The Gulag Archipelago, exposed the horrors of the Soviet labor camp system and influenced global understanding of totalitarianism. He received numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in Literature 1970, the Templeton Prize, and the State Prize of the Russian Federation. Posthumously, his legacy continues through his writings and his impact on human rights discourse. His unyielding courage in speaking truth to power and his monumental literary indictment of Soviet repression define his legacy.