Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Russian: Александр Исаевич Солженицын, Romanized: Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, pronounced: [ɐlʲɪkˈsandr ɪˈsajɪvʲɪtɕ səlʐɨˈnʲitsɨn]; December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008), Soviet and Russian philosopher, historian, short story writer, dissident and political prisoner. Solzhenitsyn unabashedly criticized the Soviet Union and communism, and after settling in the United States, he criticized liberal values ​​without mercy. His stance made it difficult for both the left and the right to get along with him. He is a Nobel Prize winner in literature and an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has made great achievements in many fields such as literature, history, and linguistics. After serving in the Soviet Red Army during World War II, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp before being exiled for criticizing Stalin in a private letter. The reforms introduced by Khrushchev liberated him from exile in 1956, and only one of his works was allowed to be published in the Soviet Union, the novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1962). But the publication of "The Cancer Ward" (1968), "August 1914" (1971) and "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973) outside the Soviet Union angered Brezhnev and Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship. In 1974 he flew to West Germany and moved to the United States with his family in 1976, where he continued to write and turn to criticize the United States. In 1990, near the collapse of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored. Four years later, he returned to Russia and criticized Russia's poor social situation under Yeltsin until his death in 2008. He won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature for his pursuit of the traditional moral power of Russian literature. His "Gulag Archipelago" was a highly influential work that "posed a head-on challenge to the Soviet Union" and sold tens of millions of copies. Some people regard him as a great writer and hero who fought against the Soviet authorities, but Solzhenitsyn also criticized all democrats, capitalists, individual consumers, liberals, etc. As an eternal opposition, in the eyes of the people, he is a person who is difficult to understand and face.