August 1914

About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in physics and mathematics from Rostov University and studied literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War Two he fought as an artillery officer attaining the rank of captain. In 1945 however after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps followed by internal exile. In 1957 he was formally rehabilitated and settled down to teaching and writing in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by the publication in the West of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont USA and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel of which August 1914 is the first volume. In 1990 with the fall of Soviet Communism his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia. He died in 2008 near Moscow at the age of eighty-nine.