The Gulag Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has made a huge impact on literature around the world. His writings are based on his real life experiences and the experiences of the people around him. The characters that painted the images of his stories in the minds of the readers were either real or based off of   real people.   The Gulag Archipelago is non fiction but some things were slightly modified for privacy. With books such as The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, they are based on his experiences but he made stories out of them. He will forever have a legacy of chilling tales and brutally descriptive accounts of the terrors that come from being imprisoned in one of the worlds most notorious prison systems.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born December 11, 1918, shortly after his father was killed in a freak hunting accident. He was born into a poor family with a hard working mother in Kislovodsk, Russia. He grew up without a father, and his family remained extremely poor and poverty stricken. Solzhenitsyn loved literature from a very young age and planned to write a novel on the Russian Revolution before he turned eighteen years old. He went to Rostov University and studied mathematics and physics. He graduated with a dual degree in these two subjects. He wanted to go to Moscow university but his mother could not afford it. He ended up going to a military academy. Some of his famous works included “We Never Make Mistakes” published in 1963, “For the Good of the Cause” published in 1964, and The First Circle published in 1968. For a period in his life he was an artillery commander for the Red Army on the german front. He was arrested for critizing Stalin in his writings, and locked in a gulag of several years. During these years he accounted his day to day thoughts and feelings in his writings. The most powerful being the Gulag archipelago because the reader senses the cold blood while also knowing that it is non fiction. During his exile, he taught...