Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Photo:
|
 |
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dies in Moscow
Distinguished Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn died Sunday night at the age of 90. According to preliminary information, the cause of death was a heart attack. The RIA Novosti information agency reports that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has already expressed his sympathy to Solzhenitsyn’s widow and sons.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was born December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk. In 1939, he was accepted in the correspondence section of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. In 1941, he graduated from the physics and mathematics department of Rostov University, which he had entered in 1936.
Solzhenitsyn fought in World War II and was awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War, 2nd degree, and the Red Star. On February 9, 1945, he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in personal letters to his childhood friend Nikolay Vitkevich. He was sentenced to eight years in a prisons camp. In 1953, he was released, but not allowed to live in the European part of the Soviet Union. Instead, he was sent for “permanent settlement” to the village of Kok-Terek in the Zhambyl Region of Kazakhstan.
Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated in 1956 by order of the Supreme Court of the USSR and his works began to appear in print. His story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was nominated for the Lenin Prize, but it elicited a negative reaction from the authorities. In 1965, Solzhenitsyn’s personal archive fell into the hands of the KGB and he was banned from further publishing in the USSR. He was expelled from the Writers Union in 1969. In 1970, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
After the publication of GULAR Archipelago abroad, Solzhenitsyn was arrest. He was found guilty in court of state treason, stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled from the country. He lived in Switzerland and then the United States during his forced exile. His Soviet citizenship was resotred in 1990 by order of the president of the USSR. He was awarded the State Prize almost immediately after that.
Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. He was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997.
www.kommersant.com
|
|
|
