Gulag man Solzhenitsyn is dead

I've just learnt of the passing of Alexander Solzhensitzyn, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. He died yesterday in Moscow, aged 89, of either heart failure or a stroke.

In the 70s, I read his works fervently, starting with One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and progressing to The First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Love-Girl And the Innocent and Gulag Archipelago. They were all eye-opening accounts of life in the Sovet Union, especially the labour camps. I can term it in two words: bleak and awful.

Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet artillery officer in World War II, was decorated for his courage but denounced in 1945 for criticising Stalin in a letter. He experienced Gulag life for eight years. In 1962, Denisovich was published. After the first volume of Gulag appeared in 1973, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled. Eventually, he settled in Vermont, USA, where he completed the other two volumes of Gulag. He only returned to Russia in 1994 after the Soviet Union had collapsed two years earlier. His return was dramatic as he chose to travel overland from the Russian Far East.