Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn books

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The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Reading Order

The Red Wheel Reading Order

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and political prisoner whose writing brought the reality of the Soviet labor camp system to a global audience. Born in 1918, he served as an artillery officer in World War II before being arrested in 1945 for private criticism of Stalin. He spent eight years in prisons and labor camps, followed by internal exile in Kazakhstan.

His first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), appeared during Khrushchev’s brief thaw and described a single day in a Soviet labor camp. The novella made him famous overnight. He followed it with Cancer Ward and In the First Circle, both drawn from his own experiences of imprisonment and illness. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he did not travel to Stockholm to accept it for fear of not being allowed back into the Soviet Union.

The Gulag Archipelago, a massive three-volume account of the Soviet camp system based on his own experience and testimony from over 200 other prisoners, was published abroad starting in 1973. The Soviet government expelled him in 1974. He lived in Vermont for nearly two decades before returning to Russia in 1994. His later work includes The Red Wheel, an ambitious multi-volume historical novel cycle about the Russian Revolution.