Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn redefined Russian modern literature. The publication — in the Soviet Union — of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) not only exemplified the all-too-brief period of the Khrushchev thaw, but it also became an international event. His The Gulag Archipelago and The First Circle exposed the institutionalised brutality of the Soviet system and provoked widespread debate about individual morality and personal responsibility — a debate both vital and unfamiliar in a society so accustomed to unthinking acts of collective brutality.

Solzhenitsyn wrote about subjects rarely tackled in Soviet or Russian literature, such as the uprising by prisoners against the authorities in The Tanks Know the Truth, and he did so in a vivid language permeated with the slang and vocabulary that developed in that vast network of penal labour and prison camps which has come to be known as the Gulag.

Post-communist Russians, caught in the turmoil of political change and the scramble for material wealth, hailed Solzhenitsyn’s lasting greatness as the author of such works as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward (1968) and The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes; 1973-78), which had for the first time spelt out in public the horrors of the Soviet system. And although post-perestroika Russians found his continued moralising on the fate of the nation an embarrassment and his authority waned after 1991, interest in him picked up again towards the end of his life.

During his last years a colossal project to publish all his works in one collection was undertaken. Although as time passed his position became increasingly nationalist and patriotic, for instance in his support for military action in Chechnya, he remained an iconic figure to Western liberals of a certain age.

Times Archive, 1976: Warning to the West

We offer you the experience of our suffering; we would like you to accept it without having to pay the monstrous price of death and slavery

• Leading article: The warning and the hope

• Solzhenitsyn expelled from Russia

• Nobel award to disgraced writer

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• A lone voice willing to speak the truth at any cost

• Putin leads tributes to Solzhenitsyn

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• Pictures: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn ranks alongside such great visionary authors such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the political exile Alexander Herzen, who found moral fault with the human condition. Disappointment at the state of the West drove each of these writers back home with a new passion to define a superior Russian way.

Solzhenitsyn’s novels exemplify the realism, moral discernment and triumph over suffering that many associate particularly with Russian literature. For some he was a kind of alternative government, directing Russians to reflect on their own participation or acquiescence in the monstrous inhumanities of Stalin’s terror and tyranny.

He spoke for the army of otherwise unmentioned dead: workers, peasants, old Bolsheviks, minority nations, intellectuals who passed through the camps and prisons, and their families.

His insistence that the whole truth about this period must be told as the precondition for a healthier future brought him into conflict — and later into collision — with the Soviet bureaucracy. He sometimes seemed to be waging war single handedly against the massed power of the Soviet State.

But his writing was always more than a political or even a moral campaign in one country. As with Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn asked by what morality should a man be guided, how should he live; he rallied against all forms of what he saw as spiritual darkness.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born at Kislovodsk in the central Caucasus in 1918. His father had died just before he was born, after serving in the First World War — a subject to which Solzhenitsyn would return in his historical novel August 1914.

Solzhenitsyn was brought up in Rostov-on-Don, and he studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. Shortly after he graduated in 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and he was called up into the Red Army. By 1943 he was the commander of a reconnaissance division in the artillery, and as the Russian front line advanced he participated in some of the heaviest fighting of the war, reaching eastern Prussia by the first months of 1945. There Solzhenitsyn, already twice decorated for bravery, emerged from the fierce battle for Königsberg only to be arrested by the NKVD and charged under the Soviet Criminal Code with having made derogatory remarks about Stalin in his correspondence.

He was sentenced to eight years’ “deprivation of liberty”, passed through the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, then Mavrino, a prison research institute on the outskirts of the city where prisoners with technical knowledge worked in relatively good conditions, and finally, after refusing to co-operate with the research programme, he was sent to a labour camp.