ABSTRACT
In the 1960s and 1970S Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn produced a number of major novels based on his own experience of Soviet prison and hospital life before turning to what he had come to regard as his primary mission, namely the semifictionalized rewriting of Russian history of the revolutionary period in the multivolumed Krasnoe koleso (1983-91; The Red Wheel) . Solzhenitsyn first dreamed of writing novels about the revolution as early as 1937. By the 1970S he had become the most famous of all Soviet dissidents, and his works were greatly feared by the Soviet regime, which did all it could to minimize their effect. In the United States he became an almost reclusive emigre, pronouncing on many aspects of the West and Russia, but he returned to Russia after the collapse of communism in the hope of leading a national revival. His novels, which were all written in the Soviet Union but were for the most part published abroad by tamizdat, are more remarkable for their content than their literary finesse, although Solzhenitsyn, who clearly belongs to the 19th-century novelistic tradition, made many controversial innovations in the use of language and, particularly, lexicon. Together with his nonfiction Arkhipelag GULag: I9I8-I956 (1973-76; The Gulag Archipelago) his novels stand as a memorable and lasting record of the abuse of Soviet power.
