Almanac of Story Tellers: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

   Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of December 11th.

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    It is the 345th day of the year, leaving 20 days in 2021.

    On this date in 1918, the author and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kisolovodsk, Russia. He went on to become one of the best known Soviet dissidents and an outspoken critic of communisn and political oppression.

    His novel, One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovitch, was pushlished in 1961 with the approval of then-Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev. It was a short novel based on Solzhenitsyn's arrest during World War II for writing a letter that criticized then-Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Solzhenitsyn spent eight years imprised in a Gulag, and another three years in internal exile.

 

    Solzhenitsyn became famous both in the Soiet Union and worldwide for the novel, and it inspired other dissidents to publish their own works. In a couple of years, however, crackdowns in the Soviet Union led Solzhenitsyn to fall out of favor, But he continued to write , and his novels earned him international acclaim..

     In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation praised him for his dedication to the "indispensible tradition of Russian literature." He did not travel to Stockholm to receive the prize for fear that his government would not allow him to return to Russia.

    But a few years later, the first edition of his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, was published in Paris. The work is Solzhenitsyn's effort "to compile a literary-historial record of the vast systems of prisons and labor camps that came in being ... (in 1971) and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin," according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

    The work describes the arrest and imprisonment of thousands in the Gulag, with historical detail and Solzhenitsyn's own experiences and interviews with fellow inmates. It was coinsidered a "head-on challenge to the Soviet state." The Soviet government responded with his arrest on charges of treason, and his exile. Solzhenitsyn eventually settled in the United States, where he lived before returning to Rusia in 1994, after his Soviet citizenship was restored.

    He remained in the public eye in Russia, writing, speaking, and hosting a television show.

    He died of a heart attack on Aug. 6, 2008. He was 89.