Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies
Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of 89
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Monday, 04, Aug 2008 03:18
The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of 89, his family has confirmed.
Famed for his chronicling of the Soviet gulag concentration camps, Mr Solzhenitsyn won numerous awards including the Nobel prize for literature.
The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich spent 20 years in exile after exposing Stalin's brutal prison system.
His son Stephan said he died of heart failure at his Moscow home at 23:45 local time (20:45 BST) on Sunday.
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin today described Solzhenitsyn's death as a "heavy loss for Russia".
French president Nicolas Sarkozy also paid tribute to Mr Solzhenitsyn, describing him as "one of the greatest consciences of 20th century Russia".
"His intransigence, his ideals and his long, eventful life make of Solzhenitsyn a storybook figure, heir to Dostoyevsky," Mr Sarkozy said.
And a Kremlin spokesperson said Russian president Dmitry Medvedev had sent his condolences.
Mr Solzhenitsyn served in the Soviet artillery during the second world war but was denounced after criticising Stalin.
He was sent to one of Russia's notorious Siberian prison camps, or gulag, for eight years before being exiled to Kazakhstan.
It was during his exile that he published One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, an account of a day in a gulag prisoner's life.
In the 1974 he published the first volume of his Gulag Archipelago, detailing Soviet abuses from 1918 to 1956 including the vast network of prison and labour camps.
His work provoked a furious backlash in Russia and he was denounced as a traitor. In the same year he was exiled to the US where he completed the other two volumes of the Gulag Archipelago.
He returned to Russia in 1994 and continued to write, his last major work being an account of the role of Jewish people in the Russian Revolution.