WHEN Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 after 20 years in exile he was welcomed as a hero.

As he toured the country by train, thousands turned out to listen to him complain about the corruption and poverty that had engulfed post-Soviet Russia. He was received by Boris Yeltsin, then President, and addressed the Duma.

But over the next decade his profile in Russia and the West waned with his health. And although he continued to write, he never achieved again the recognition that he did with his earlier work.

Solzhenitsyn fought in the Red Army during the Second World War but was arrested in 1945 for criticising Stalin, the Soviet leader, in letters to his brother-in-law. He spent the next ten years in prisons and forced labour camps around Russia and Kazakhstan. His experiences in captivity inspired his most famous works — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward and the Gulag Archipelago trilogy — much of which were written in secret.

His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962 in the period of relative openness after Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, denounced Stalin.

The period of official favour lasted only a few years and by 1966 all of Solzhenitsyn’s works were censored. In 1969 he was thrown out of the Writers’ Union.

His unpublished manuscripts were smuggled to the West, where he developed a reputation as one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent critics. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 — in what was seen in Moscow as a hostile move by the West — and was deported to West Germany four years later.

Stripped of Soviet citizenship, he settled first in Switzerland, and then in the United States, but never really adapted to life in the West.

His host country also grew increasingly uncomfortable with his radical political views. He railed against Western values almost as much as he did against the Soviet system and argued that Russia could be saved only by returning to its cultural and religious roots. He was also accused of being anti-Semitic for linking Russia’s historical suffering to its Jewish and other minorities.

He found a more sympathetic audience back home in Russia where, in 1997, he was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and established his own literature prize.

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