What Solzhenitsyn Understood

For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no literary form was ever sufficiently capacious. Three gargantuan works dominated his creative life. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, on which his reputation mainly rests, chronicles in three volumes the history of Soviet forced labor camps. It earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and forced exile from the Soviet Union in 1974, the first official expulsion since Leon Trotsky had been deported to Turkey in 1929. Solzhenitsyn himself regarded The Red Wheel, a series of novels about the Russian Revolution, as his major contribution to literature. These novels posed a question: Why and how did the unprecedented horror described in The Gulag Archipelago occur? The answers Solzhenitsyn arrived at shaped his third great project, four volumes of memoirs.