Solzhenitsyn came to personify resistance to Communist repression.
He had his work smuggled out of the country and published abroad, where the literary greats of Europe and the U.S. But when Khrushchev was ousted from power, the hard-liners who replaced him stopped publication of his new works and had him expelled from the Soviet writers union. "It meant that this topic, after this event, would no longer be a forbidden topic."Īnd so, Solzhenitsyn, an unknown math teacher from the provinces, leapt to fame. Human-rights activist Liudmila Alexeeva, in an interview with NPR, recalled the publication of Ivan Denisovich in an official journal, Novy Mir (New World), as a great event in Soviet public life. The story, set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, a day that was unremarkable for millions of prisoners like him, despite the brutal hardships.
Then, in 1962, during the brief post-Stalin thaw, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered the publication of Solzhenitsyn's short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He was 89 years old and, according to his son, died of heart failure.įor years, Solzhenitsyn had written with scant hope of seeing his works in print. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, shown in a 1970 file photo after accepting his Nobel Prize for literature, died Sunday at the age of 89.Īlexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian literary giant who shook the foundations of the Soviet state with his works exposing the horrors of the Communist regime, died Sunday night at his home outside Moscow.
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