Although his works were banned in the Soviet Union, the Russian novelist Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (born 1918) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, descended from a family of Cossack intellectuals, was born in Koslovodsk, a resort town in the northern Caucasus, on December 11, 1918, a year after the Bolsheviks had stormed to power throughout Russia. His petit bourgeois family moved to the southern Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don when Solzhenitsyn was a child, and there he grew up. His father, an office worker, died when Solzhenitsyn was still young, and his mother, a schoolteacher, brought the boy up. He studied at the University of Rostov, majoring in physics and mathematics, and received a degree in 1941.

Military Service and Imprisonment

In 1941 Solzhenitsyn's life changed drastically. After the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Solzhenitsyn was drafted into the Red Army as a private and was sent to...