FACTBOX - Russian Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 12th December, 2018) Great Russian writer and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have turned 100 years old on Tuesday.

Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in the city of Kislovodsk in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

His father studied at Moscow State University, but did not complete his studies, as he volunteered for the front line when World War I broke out in 1914. He died in 1918 because of a hunting accident before his son was born.

In 1924, Solzhenitsyn and his mother moved to the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

In 1936, after graduating from high school, he entered the mathematics department of Rostov State University, which he graduated in 1941. At the same time, from 1939 to 1941 he studied at the correspondence department of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History.

After World War II started, Solzhenitsyn was mobilized in October 1941. In November 1942 he graduated from an artillery school and was appointed commander of the reconnaissance artillery battery.

On February 9, 1945, at the front in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for disrespectful remarks about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in letters to his childhood friend. On July 27, 1945, he was sentenced to eight years of labor camps under the 58th Article of the Soviet Criminal Code.

Solzhenitsyn was initially held in a Moscow prison, and then he was transferred to Marfino, a specialized prison near Moscow, where mathematicians, physicists and scientists of other specialties conducted secret scientific research. The experience of these years is reflected by the writer in such novels as The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago.

In 1950, Solzhenitsyn was sent to a camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. There he got cancer and nearly died. He had a tumor removed in February 1952. In February 1953, Solzhenitsyn was sent into the perpetual exile to Kokterek, southern Kazakhstan.

On February 6, 1956, Solzhenitsyn was officially rehabilitated by the Soviet government, which made possible his return to Russia.

In 1956-1957 he worked as a teacher in a village school in the Russian region of Vladimir, and then until 1962 he was teaching at a school in the city of Ryazan.

In May-June 1959, he wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The manuscript was given to the Russian literary journal Novy Mir's editor-in-chief, Aleksandr Tvardovsky. In November 1962, the journal published the novel.

In January 1963, Novy Mir published his novellas Matryona's Place and An Incident at Krechetovka Station. In 1965-1968, Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago and in 1966 he finished the novel Cancer Ward.

After Khrushchev's "Thaw" � a period when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed � was reverted, Solzhenitsyn faced criticism by the authorities. A campaign was launched against the writer and in September 1965, the Committee for State Security (KGB) arrested the author's archive. The possibilities of publication were foreclosed. Only one story, Zakhar-the-Pouch, was published in Novy Mir in 1966.

In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union.

His novels The First Circle and the Cancer Ward were published outside the Soviet Union in 1968 and 1969 without the author's permission.

Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."

In February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, charged with treason and stripped of his citizenship. For some time the writer lived in Switzerland with his family. In 1976, Solzhenitsyn moved to the United States, the state of Vermont, where he completed the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago.

His main work was a multi-volume epic of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel, where he analyzed the political and ideological platforms of various parties and groups, and substantiated the possibility of alternative historical development of Russia.

In addition to works of fiction, Solzhenitsyn was actively involved in journalism.

The Gulag Archipelago was printed in the Soviet Union first time only in 1989, following the start of perestroika. Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was restored in August 1990.

In the same year, Soviet newspapers Literaturnaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda published his article named How to Revitalize Russia.

In 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. In 1995-1997, Novy Mir published his stories; his book Between Two Millstones was published in 1998; his literary and historical study, dedicated to Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together was published in 2001-2002.

Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow on August 3, 2008, and was buried at the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery.

Solzhenitsyn was awarded many ranks and received numerous awards. He was a full-fledged member of the Russian academy of Sciences and an honorary doctor of Lomonosov Moscow State University. There are the Order of the Patriotic War of the second degree (1943) and the Order of the Red Star (1944) among his military awards.

In 1990, the writer was awarded the State Prize of the RSFSR in the field of literature. In 1998, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Order of St. Andrew, but refused the award. For outstanding achievements in the field of humanitarian activities Solzhenitsyn was awarded the State Prize of Russia in 2006.

In August 2008, he was posthumously awarded literary Big Book Prize in the nomination "For honor and dignity."

Since 1999, the Solzhenitsyn literary prize has been awarded in Moscow. The financial support of the award is provided by the Solzhenitsyn Fund, which the writer founded in 1974 and endowed it with all the proceeds from the global sales of The Gulag Archipelago. The fund provides systematic assistance to victims of political repression, finances projects related to the preservation of Russian culture and is engaged in publishing activity.

A number of streets and houses in Russian cities are named after Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn's second wife, Natalia Solzhenitsyna, is the president of the Solzhenitsyn Russian Public Fund and the editor-compiler of the 30-volume collection of the writer's works. She is also a member of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art.

Solzhenitsyn and his second wife had three sons � Yermolay (1970), Ignat (1972) and Stepan (1973).