Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his writings he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system — particularly The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his two best-known works. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. and returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn is the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
