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Mavrino is the setting of his novel The First Circle (1968), which also includes a celebrated description of the Lubyanka. The labour camp experience was the basis for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his first novel — and the only one to be published in Soviet Russia.

In 1953 Solzhenitsyn was released from the camp, and began his term of what was called “internal exile” in Kazakhstan. A cancerous tumour in his stomach, already operated on once, became active again. He entered an oncological hospital not expecting to live. This was an experience he used as the basis first for a short prose poem, and later for one of his most powerful novels, Cancer Ward.

Solzhenitsyn’s novels were literary interweavings of historical fact and imagined material. However, when, as in August 1914 (1971; expanded 1984) or The Gulag Archipelago, he moved beyond his own experience, he drew on a wealth of close, factual documentation from written sources and eye-witness statements. Yet even these works transcended their documentary foundations because Solzhenitsyn was always careful to anchor his material in the reality of his human characters, their individual awareness and their discussions of life and history.

Solzhenitsyn did not revel in the brutality that he depicted, preferring instead to offer measured descriptions of the unremarked daily cruelties inherent to the Soviet system.

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

Related Links

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

• Putin leads tributes to Solzhenitsyn

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• Pictures: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He was in hospital when he heard of Khrushchev’s first denunciation of Stalin, in 1956. In this new era Solzhenitsyn found himself rehabilitated in more ways than one — his cancer treatment had been a success, and his conviction was quashed.

He had married Natalya Reshetovskaya before the outbreak of war, but when he was imprisoned he had granted her a divorce. She remarried, briefly, but when Solzhenitsyn was released, she went back to him, and they were married for a second time in 1957. Reshetovskaya was a chemistry teacher, and Solzhenitsyn too now took a post as a mathematics and physics teacher in the secondary school at Ryazan on the Volga.

During the next few years he started to write down many of the works he had composed, and memorised, while he was in the Gulag. In addition to his groundbreaking One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (later referred to as Ivan Denisovich) he also wrote a play, and several short stories. These he submitted, late in 1960, to Alexandr Tvardovsky, editor of the literary monthly Novy Mir, and two years later several were printed.

Tvardovsky saw that the short novel Solzhenitsyn had submitted to him — Ivan Denisovich — was unlike anything that had been printed with official sanction before. Publication would require permission from the highest level. Tvardovsky raised the matter directly with Khrushchev, who approved its publication. Some have argued that this was an opportunistic move on Khrushchev’s part because he sought to strengthen his own hand within the Kremlin. Whatever his motives, the publication of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation. It brought Solzhenitsyn a mass of letters from fellow Russians, and it brought Soviet publishers numerous manuscripts from former prisoners.

Although the publication of Ivan Denisovich seemed to herald a new era of greater freedom in the Soviet Union, it turned out to be but a brief moment of liberty. Already by May 1967, in his letter of appeal to the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers, Solzhenitsyn was chronicling the abuses to which he was subject and against which the Writers’ Union had failed to defend him: slanderous press campaigns against his war record, theft of manuscripts and refusal to publish his more recent work. Cancer Ward, one of the least political of his novels, was reported to have been set up in type in the Soviet Union but, like The First Circle, it was published only in the West. Solzhenitsyn had warned the Writers’ Union that a copy might reach the West against his wishes.

In the years that followed Solzhenitsyn found himself on the wrong side of the authorities. He learnt how to challenge the boundaries of the repressive regime; he held press conferences and wrote open letters to be published in the West. Eminent Russians such as

Alexandr Tvardovsky, Lydia Chukovskaya, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the scientist Andrei Sakharov, among others, gave him moral and practical support during these difficult years. But he was a controversial figure, and the tide of reaction was moving against him. He was expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1969.

In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to wide acclaim, including that of many Western communist parties. He did not go to Stockholm to receive the prize, fearing that he would be denied re-entry to his own country, but his acceptance speech, read out at the ceremony, drew attention to the importance of human rights everywhere. The attacks on Solzhenitsyn were now open and direct in the Soviet press and continued intermittently, along with personal harassment.