Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested at the front in 1945 for criticising Stalin in a letter, spent eight years in the camps and three in exile, and survived cancer, experiences that became One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, set in a prison research institute, and Cancer Ward. The Gulag Archipelago got him expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, the year after his Nobel Prize. He lived in Vermont for twenty years, returned to Russia in 1994, and disappointed the West with his criticism of it. The lists read the two novels as the record of the century’s other totalitarianism.