Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 (died, August 3, 2008) and, as a novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and dissident helped bring down the totalitarian Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn’s novels include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and Cancer Ward (1966). His behemoth history of Soviet prison camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was a major event in the cultural eclipse of far left ideology in the West, when it was published in 1973.