Solzhenitsyn

This book, first published in 1984, was the first full biography of Solzhenitsyn. Starting with his childhood, it covers every period of his life in considerable detail, showing how Solzhenitsyns development paralleled and mirrored the development of Soviet society: ambitious and idealistic in the twenties and thirties, preoccupied with the struggle for survival in the forties, hopeful in the fifties and sixties and disillusioned in the seventies. Solzhenitsyns life thus serves as a paradigm for the history of twentieth-century Communism and for the intelligentsias attitudes to Communism. At the same time, this book relates Solzhenitsyns life to his works, all of which contain a large element of autobiography.