Solzhenitsyn: A Life In Pictures

The son of intellectuals, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, southern Russia, in 1918. Shortly after graduating in mathematics and physics he joined the Soviet war effort.

Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer during World War II, but quickly became disillusioned with the management of the war. In letters to friends he was critical of Stalin. In an event that changed the course of his life, the letters were intercepted by the secret police.

Denounced as a traitor in 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sent to gulags in Russia and Kazakhstan for eight years. The photo shows Solzhenitsyn, prisoner #282, being searched in 1953. After three more years of internal exile in Kazakhstan, he returned to Russia to work as a schoolteacher.

Following the thaw and denunciation of Stalin in the late 1950s under Nikita Khrushchev (pictured here in 1964), Solzhenitsyn was permitted to publish his largely autobiographical "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich."

Solzhenitsyn became a celebrity in the Soviet Union, pictured here with the Belarusian writer Vasil Bykau in 1967. After the hard-line Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev in 1964, Solzhenitsyn received greater scrutiny from the KGB. But internationally his reputation soared and, in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

After the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in 1973, Solzhenitsyn was denounced as a traitor by the Soviet press. In 1974, the Soviet authorities took away his citizenship and expelled him from the country.

After a spell in Switzerland, Solzhenitsyn eventually settled in a small village in Vermont. There he worked on the "Red Wheel," a historical cycle of the events leading up to the 1917 revolution. In the West, he was often accused of anti-Semitism and nationalism.

In 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after a 20-year exile. Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 restored his Soviet citizenship and dropped treason charges against him.

Back in Russia, Solzhenitsyn continued to lament Russia's spiritual decay and called for a moral revival based on Christian values. But his message was lost on many Russians, especially from the younger post-Soviet generation.

In 2007, Solzhenitsyn received a Russian State Prize for his "humanitarian" contribution. He was too frail to attend the ceremony, but later met President Vladimir Putin at his home outside Moscow.

He is survived by his wife, Natalia, who served as his assistant and spokeswoman for many years, and by three sons.