Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, in the spa town of Kislovodsk in the North Caucausus mountains. His father, a former philology student at Moscow University, had died in World War I six months before his only son's birth. Alexander Isaevich, therefore, was born to a widowed mother in relatively indigent circumstances.
The elder Solzhenitsyn had volunteered from the army, abandoning his course of study, in 1914 and had served as an artillery officer on the...