When the Second World War started he was assigned to an artillery unit because of his mathematics background. He was eventually in charge of a company of men until in 1945 he was arrested for writing a letter that criticized Stalin. He received an eight year sentence in both prison and labour camps, after that he was exiled to Kazakhstan for a further three years. During this time he taught mathematics and physics as well as continuing with his writing in secret. Not even his closest friends knew he was writing. Despite his efforts he was convinced his writing would never be published. In 1961 he announced his writing secret and published ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ a short novel which became an instant success. He followed this with a collection of short stories in 1963.

 The government then withdrew its permission for him to publish his work and seized all his manuscripts. Solzhenitsyn then began to circulate his work secretly and had several novels published outside the Soviet Union including ‘The First Circle’ and ‘Cancer Ward’ both 1968 and ‘August 1914’ published in 1971. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 but declined the invitation to go to Sweden for fear that if he left the Soviet Union he would be denied the chance to return. In 1973 the publication of parts of ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ in Paris led to his arrest and in 1974 he was exiled from the Soviet Union.

He moved to Vermont, where he continued with his writing. In 1990 his Russian citizenship was restored and so he returned to the country of his birth. He died on August 3rd 2008 of heart failure in Moscow the city he was once too poor to go to, he was 89.