Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
AFP/Getty
"He worked yesterday just like any other day," said the younger Solzhenitsyn. "Then in the evening, death came quickly … I am in mourning but I also express gratitude to everyone who will remember this moment, remember Solzhenitsyn."
Decorated as an artillery commander in the Red Army during World War II, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was tried for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda following the exposure of a letter he had written to a friend.
His subsequent eight-year imprisonment in a gulag (forced labor camp) inspired his work, which he was forced to compose in secret and commit to memory.
Smuggled into the West, his 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was adapted into a movie and bought its author international acclaim.
Cancer Ward, in 1968, recounted the disease that nearly killed him. Solzhenitsyn's later The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago detailed Soviet prison life in harrowing detail, likening the experience to a "meat grinder."
Solzhenitsyn won the 1970 Nobel Prize for literature but could not collect it because of harassment by the KGB's secret police force.
Four years later he was expelled and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Relocating to Vermont, where he railed against the West's moral corruption, Solzhenitsyn returned to post-Soviet Russia as a hero in 1994.
On Monday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin led the tributes, calling Solzhenitsyn's death a "heavy loss for the whole of Russia."
In a telegram to the writer's family, he described the writer as "a strong, courageous person with enormous dignity."
