Upon publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was immediately attacked in the Soviet press. Despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, he was arrested and charged with treason on Feb. 12, 1974. Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union on the following day, and in December he took possession of his Nobel Prize.
In 1975 a documentary novel, Lenin v Tsyurikhe: glavy (Lenin in Zurich: Chapters), appeared. Subsequently, Solzhenitsyn traveled to the United States, where he eventually settled on a secluded estate in Cavendish, Vt. The second and third volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were published in 1974–75. Solzhenitsyn produced two books of nonfiction in 1980: The Oak and the Calf, which portrayed literary life in the Soviet Union, and the brief The Mortal Danger, which analyzed what he perceived to be the perils of American misconceptions about Russia. In 1983 an extensively expanded and revised version of August 1914 appeared in Russian as the first part of a projected series, Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel); other volumes (or uzly [“knots”]) in the series were Oktyabr 1916 (“October 1916”), Mart 1917 (“March 1917”), and Aprel 1917 (“April 1917”).
In presenting alternatives to the Soviet regime, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tended to reject Western emphases on democracy and individual freedom and instead favoured the formation of a benevolent authoritarian regime that would draw upon the resources of Russia's traditional Christian values. The introduction of glasnost (“openness”) in the late 1980s brought renewed access to Solzhenitsyn's work in the Soviet Union. In 1989 the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir published the first officially approved excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was officially restored in 1990. He ended his exile and returned to Russia in 1994. --Copyright © Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
