Much like the Famous Writers Shirtless posts, here we'll occasionally dive into mugshots of the criminally-inclined writers who found themselves in the big house.
Mugshots? Yes, please.
Today: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The 1970 Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, found himself on the wrong side of Soviet authorities in 1945 after some of his private letters were found by the KGB to be critical of Joseph Stalin. How critical? Statements like calling Stalin "the boss" and "the master of the house." Those are potentially the most nuanced and subtle insults in the history of insults, but it was apparently inflammatory to the Soviets.
That sort of behavior got you eight years in the Soviet gulags. To say Solzhenitsyn went to the cooler is putting it mildly. Most prison camps were in remote and bitterly cold regions of the USSR.
As Solzhenitsyn's lack of enthusiasm shows in his prison photo above, it was not a weekend in the Bahamas, and he was not cut any slack. Solzhenitsyn served a full eight year prison sentence, worked and froze in various gulags, and saw his wife divorce him in order for her not to be marked as a traitor to the country. (They'd later remarry and divorce again after he was released. Admittedly, they should have quit while they were ahead.)
Solzhenitsyn was released in 1953 and had some success with releasing some works, including a 1960 novel based on his experiences in the gulags called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Soviet leader at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, encouraged its publication as a tool for de-Stalinzation of the country.
Alas, hard line leaders took over power from Khrushchev, and that hard line mentality led to Solzhenitsyn being expelled from the USSR in 1974 for his works being too critical of the nation. It would be two decades until he was allowed to visit his homeland again, after the Soviet Union crumbled.
In the end, the USSR wanted to break Solzhenitsyn, but Solzhenitsyn's critical works were a small part in breaking the USSR.
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