| Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was born in Kislovodsk, Russia (1918). He went to great lengths to write and eventually publish his novels under the Communist regime of the Soviet Union. After fighting in World War II, he was arrested for writing letters that criticized Joseph Stalin. He was sentenced to eight years in Russian labor camps (gulag), where he worked as a miner, a bricklayer, and a foundryman. Upon his release, he was exiled to a village in Kazakhstan, where he taught math and physics. He began writing prose in secret, being careful not to show his work to even his closest friends, in case word got out to Soviet authorities. He said he was "convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime." Then, in 1961, the Soviet government adopted slightly looser censorship standards. Solzhenitsyn decided to risk trying to publish his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). He succeeded, but two years later the government took his books out of print and forced him to stop publishing.
Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts were smuggled into Europe and America, and they drew the attention of several major writers. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, even though he still couldn't publish in his home country. It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union that his works became widely available in Russia. Today, he's considered a national hero. ~Writer's almanac |
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