In these days, when the line between author and celebrity is increasingly blurred, readers would do well to champion the life and work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was born just after the First World War; it was during his service for his native Russia in the Second World War that his writings – a private letter which referred in derogatory terms to Stalin – first came under suspicion.

Years of internal exile and suffering never daunted him. The 1962 publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a revelation; until its publication in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir, no Soviet writer had dared tackle the subject of Stalin’s concentration camps. “Solzhenitsyn’s words burn like acid,” said The New York Times when the English translation appeared a year later.

In 1974, four years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was expelled from the Soviet Union when the KGB discovered the first part of the manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago in his papers.

Written over a period of ten years, this nonfiction account of life in the labour camps was viewed by Solzhenitsyn as his main work, its portraits drawn from his own experiences in the camps from 1945 to 1953 and those related to him by 227 other survivors.

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

“The Universe has as many different centres as there are living beings in it,” he wrote. “Each of us is a centre of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you, ‘You are under arrest.’ ” It would be 20 years before he was allowed to return to Russia; and it is worth noting that when, last year, Vladimir Putin awarded Solzhenitsyn the Russian State Prize for work in the humanities, Putin remarked on the writer’s contribution to the study of the Russian language; The Gulag Archipelago was ignored.

Yet prizes don’t make great writers; what makes a great writer is a willingness to speak the truth at any cost, and to that Solzhenitysn had a lifelong dedication – and his life was long. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, he quoted a Russian proverb: One word of truth shall outweigh the whole word.

We can only hope that he is right.

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