Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Russia. His father, an artillery officer in World War I, died in an accident before he was born, and his mother raised him on a secretary's salary. He studied mathematics at the University of Rostov and graduated in 1941, after having married fellow student Natalya Reshetovskaya in 1940. He became an artillery officer in the Soviet Army during World War II and was decorated twice for valor. However, in letters to a friend he criticized the dictator Josef Stalin, referring to him indirectly as "the whiskered one" or "the boss" in Yiddish. This led to his being stripped of his rank and medals and sentenced to a Moscow prison. He spent the last four years of his eightyear sentence at a forced-labor camp in Kazakhstan, where he conceived One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. During this period he...