(1918–    ), Russian writer and Nobel laureate, born in Kislovodsk, son of a cossack landowner and a teacher, and educated at the University of Rostov. He served in the Soviet army from 1941 to 1945, when he was sentenced to eight years in prison for anti-Stalinist remarks written to a friend, and then exiled to central Russia. Freed and rehabilitated in 1956, he used his prison experiences as background for his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962; trans. 1963). Three short stories followed in 1963–64 (pub. in the U.S. in book form as We Never Make Mistakes in 1971); later his work was denied publication in the Soviet Union. His denunciation of official censorship and the appearance of The First Circle (1968) and Cancer Ward (1968–69) in the West caused his expulsion from the Soviet Writers Union in 1969. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970.

Upon publication of his vast, documented exposé of the Soviet prison system, state terrorism, and secret police activities, first in French in 1973 and then in English in 1974 as The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, Solzhenitsyn was convicted of treason and deported in February 1974. He settled initially in Zurich, Switzerland, then moved to the U.S. in 1976. While in exile, Solzhenitsyn completed The Gulag Archipelago 2 and 3 (1975; 1978) and other books, including his memoirs, The Oak and the Calf (1980). Soviet officials dropped the charges of treason against him in 1991, and he returned to live in Russia in May 1994.