Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, D.M. Thomas writes that, in 1971, a year after winning the Nobel Prize, Solzhenitsyn was the subject of an assassination attempt when a KGB agent reportedly stabbed him with a poisoned needle in a cathedral. [1]
On 8 October 1970, The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Soviet novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” He did not receive the award until 1974 after he was expelled from the Soviet Union.
Born in 1918, Solzhenitsyn was a novelist, dramatist, and historian known as a critic of communism and an opponent of the Soviet regime. Most famously, he wrote The Gulag Archipelago which detailed the Soviet system of scattered prisons and forced labour camps.
Solzhenitsyn drew on his own experiences in his writing. In 1945 he was arrested for criticising Stalin in private correspondence and sentenced to 8 years in a labour camp. This experience provided him with material for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which he was permitted to publish in 1962. It would remain his only major work to appear in his motherland until 1990.
Despite authorities attempting to discourage him, Solzhenitsyn continued writing novels about Soviet repressions, and these were published in other countries. The Gulag Archipelago, published in 1973, sold tens of millions of copies but it outraged the authorities, and, in 1974 he was arrested, deported to West Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. He later moved with his family to the United States, where he continued writing. He received several literature prizes during his lifetime.
Shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until he died aged 89, in 2008.