About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and outspoken critic of the Soviet Union, especially its totalitarianism, who helped to raise global awareness of its gulag forced labor camp system. While his writings were long suppressed in the Soviet Union, he published many books in the West, most notably One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". Afraid to go to Stockholm to receive his award for fear that he wouldn't be allowed to reenter, he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.