Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago carries the subtitle An Experiment in Literary Investigation, which is close to what it is: a history of the Soviet camp system built from the author's own eight years inside it and the testimony of 227 other former prisoners. Solzhenitsyn wrote it in secret between 1958 and 1968, keeping sections apart so that no single seizure could take the whole thing. Born in Kislovodsk in 1918, he commanded an artillery sound-ranging battery in the Second World War and was decorated for bravery before the security services arrested him in February 1945 over letters mocking Stalin. Camps followed, then exile in Kazakhstan. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich reached print in Moscow in 1962 during Khrushchev's thaw, and almost nothing else of his did. The Nobel Prize came in 1970, though he stayed away from Stockholm rather than risk being refused re-entry. After the KGB found a hidden copy of the manuscript in Leningrad in 1973, he released the book to a Paris publisher. Stripped of his citizenship in 1974, he spent two years in Zurich before settling in Vermont, and returned to Russia in 1994, and died in 2008 at 89.