Solzhenitsyn is a major Russian writer, acclaimed for his realistic and cynical portrayal of Stalinist excesses and the reality of communism in the second half of the twentieth century. He was greatly persecuted by the Soviets. In 1945, he was sentenced to eight years' hard labour as a punishment for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend, and all his books were banned in his homeland. However, given Solzhenitsyn's stature in the world (he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970), he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1974 and settled in Vermont, New
… More England.Solzhenitsyn was married to Natalya Reshetovskaya from 1957 to 1970.
