Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian writer. He was the winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature.
Solzhenitsyn was a novelist, dramatist, and historian. With his works, the Gulags, a network of Soviet labor camp (see forced labor), became well known. Due to this, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, but also was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. In 1994, Solzhenitsyn went back to Russia. After he died (of heart failure) he received a state funeral. He was very significant for revealing what life was like in the Soviet days.
During his imprisonment he left Marxism and converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Best-known works.
Much of Solzhenitsyn's work is autobiographical, based on things he saw and experienced in his own life. Solzhenitsyn was himself imprisoned in the Gulag for many years, and later was in a cancer ward (he recovered from the cancer).
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956 Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated (cleared of all charges). The manuscript of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev defended it at the Praesidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publishing, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil".
Thus the lines between autobiography, reportage, fiction and political observations are tied up together, more so than with most writers.