1974 Few novelists’ lives in the 20th century have been as eventful as Solzhenitsyn’s. He was born into a prosperous and intellectual (but less than aristocratic) family a year after the 1917 revolution. He studied maths and philosophy at Moscow University and was, at this stage of his life, a communist patriot. In the Great Patriotic War against Germany he saw active service and rose to the rank of captain in the artillery.
In February 1945, a few weeks before victory, he was arrested for injudiciously sarcastic comments about Stalin in a letter to a friend. After the usual brutal interrogation in the Lubyanka prison, he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. This provided the experience for his first published novel (unpublishable when written – but circulated in samizdat), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Having served his sentence he was sent into internal exile (routine for political prisoners) in Kazakhstan. There he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. This supplied the experience for Cancer Ward (published in 1967 in the USSR and banned the following year) – an allegory of totalitarian life in Stalinist Russia. By now Solzhenitsyn had renounced Marxism for his idiosyncratically forged brand of Christianity – although he remained throughout his life, even in exile, a staunch Russian patriot.
In 1956, with the Khrushchevian ‘thaw’, he was permitted to return to Moscow. The Russian premier also authorised the belated publication of Ivan Denisovich in the journal Novy Mir in 1962. Solzhenitsyn’s later works were less to the authorities’ taste, after Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964. He was not allowed to collect the Nobel Prize awarded to him in 1970. He was rendered an ‘unperson’, dismissed from the Writers’ Union, and his house raided for his work in progress, the massive denunciation of Stalinist terror that was The Gulag Archipelago.
When portions of this work were published in Paris, Solzhenitsyn was arrested on 12 February 1974 and charged with treason. He was exiled the following day. He took up residence in the United States, where he was an inveterate critic of the Soviet regime – exiling him was a mistake of epic proportions. He made a triumphant return to his homeland in 1994 after the fall of the USSR and died in 2008, a survivor both of cancer and of communism.