Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Born

December 11, 1918

Died

August 3, 2008 (aged 89)

Known as

writer, historian, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, poet

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies.

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