*His childhood years were very rough. Aleksandr (pronounced Alexander) was born in Kisovodsk, Russia on December 11, 1918 (Academic American Encyclopedia Sno-Sz, p 59). His father was an artillery officer in World War I, and his mother was a typist and stenographer. Aleksandr never knew his father, because he died in a hunting accident before Aleksandr was born. After his father died, the Soviet government only allowed menial employment to his mother, so his family lived in relative poverty. Other than that, Aleksandr's childhood was relatively normal. He was a member of the Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent to Boy Scouts, and later joined the Communist Youth League. At the age of nine he decided he wanted to be a writer, and before he was eighteen he decided that he was going to write a novel about the Russian Revolution. He said that during his childhood he "bore this social tension - on one hand, they u

and 70's, the Soviet government repeatedly accused him of slandering the country's government in his work until finally, they deported him to West Germany (Major 20TH Century Writers, p 2793). This happened after he sent his story "Gulag" to Paris to be published, which was on December 28, 1973 (Encarta 99). In 1970, he received a Nobel Prize for his writings; he was not allowed to leave the country in order to claim his award. When he was deported,

*Aleksandr was put into prison several times, endured a concentration camp and lost everything in order to speak about what he thought without being scorned for it. This is why he is a dissident. Even though the leaders of the society he lived in didn't accept him or his ways of thinking, he did what he thought was the right thing, and didn't let anyone change his mind.

1) "Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr" The Encyclopedia Americana. Copyright 1992

story "Shch-845" which was written in 1954. It got past censoring and was published under the title "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and was an immediate success (The Encyclopedia Americana, p 210). Throughout the 60's

5) Bryan Ryan. Major 20TH Century Writers. Gale Research Inc. Copyright 1998

sed to tell me everything at home, and on the other, they used to work our minds at school. And so this collision between two worlds gave birth to such social tension inside me that somehow defined the path I was to follow for the rest of my life." Aleksandr had little literary education and read few western novels, and later

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