WHAT’S THE STORY?

IT is 50 years ago today that one of the most controversial of all Nobel Prizes was awarded to the Russian writer Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

Most of the world had never heard of the writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature despite having very little published.

Literary figures knew of his struggle to be published in the USSR and his 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – a searing account of life in Soviet labour camps – was only allowed to be published because Nikita Kruschev wanted the truth about his predecessor Joseph Stalin to be better known.

The Nobel Committee said it was giving him the award “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

As soon as the world learned of his award and the details of his remarkable life, he became an instant hero to many thousands who scrambled to buy One Day, his only translated book at the time. He was ranked alongside other dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov even though he often took a contrary position to them.

WHO WAS SOLZHENITSYN AND WHAT DID HE WRITE?

BORN in December 1918 in Kislovodsk and raised in Rostov-on-Don, Solzhenitsyn’s father died in an accident six months before he was even born. He was raised by his mother, who never remarried, and made sure he got a good education.

From an early age Solzhenitsyn wanted to be a writer, but he began studying maths and turned out very adept, graduating from Rostov University in 1941, a few days before Hitler’s Nazis invaded the USSR.

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He was called up and eventually his maths saw him become an officer in the Red Army’s artillery corps, where he won a medal for calculating where two German gun batteries were sited, enabling them to be destroyed.

Just at the end of the war, the Soviet censors intercepted a letter he had written to a friend which contained deprecatory remarks about Stalin. Solzhenitsyn was hauled before a special court and sentenced to eight years in a penal camp, an experience which would form the basis of his later works.

After his sentence was served, Solzhenitsyn was banished to internal exile in southern Kazakhstan, then part of the USSR, where he survived a bout with cancer that nearly killed him. In 1956, after Kruschev denounced Stalin, he was recalled from exile and exonerated, and started work as a teacher while writing in secret.

He had tried to get some books published before the war but it was only in exile that he completed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

He explained to the Nobel Committee: “During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known. Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down. I decided to emerge and to offer One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

To his surprise, authorities allowed it to be published to great acclaim, but they clamped down on his other works such as The First Circle.

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His masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, had to be smuggled out of the country. It was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century and has sold more than 55 million copies in 35 countries.

His Nobel Prize lecture was delivered in his absence and contained a powerful indictment of totalitarian censorship: “Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.”

HOW DID THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT REACT?

IT was hugely embarrassing to the government of Leonid Brezhnev. Solzhenitsyn was refused permission to travel to Sweden to collect his Nobel Prize.

Overnight he had become the most famous literary figure on the planet, and pressure grew on the Soviet authorities to allow Solzhenitsyn to have more freedom and to be allowed to publish his novels, poems and plays.

As he began to speak out about the failures of the Communist regime, he became a target for the Russian secret service.

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In 1971 he was the target of an assassination attempt by the KGB who used the poison ricin to try and kill him. He became seriously ill but survived, and he was then subjected to a vile campaign of persecution – often by fellow writers in the pay of the Soviet Government – to decry him personally and castigate his work as anti-Communist.

Eventually in 1974 Brezhnev decided to deport the writer to Germany, and from there he was able to finally go to Sweden and accept his Nobel Prize. At that time he said in an interview with The Observer: “In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.” He could have been living in contemporary Britain and America.

The Politburo – which ran the USSR – made it clear that he would never return to his native land. They were wrong.

WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM IN LATER LIFE?

WITH his fame secured, he was invited to live in the USA. He had been married twice to his first wife Natalia – they divorced to protect her after he was imprisoned and remarried later – and then had three sons with his second wife Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova.

While always appreciating the freedoms of the West, Solzhenitsyn developed a cynical view of Western society.

After the collapse of Communism he returned to Russia where he live out the final years of his life, dying in Moscow in 2008 at the age of 89.