Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his time in photographs

The photographs for the exhibition presented by: A. Solzhenitsyn family, “Moscow House of Photography” museum, State Archive of Russian Federation, Russian State Archive of cinema-photo documents, Ryazan history architecture museum-national park, private collectors

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

1918 11 December born in Kislovodsk
1936 leaves school in Rostov-on-Don
1941 graduates from Rostov University, where he studied physics and mathematics
1941–1945 serves in the army, rising from soldier to captain
1945 9 February arrested on the front in East Prussia
1945 7 July sentenced to 8 years in the labour camps according to Article 58
1953 sent into internal exile’for life’ in the settlement of Kok-Terek, Dzhambul region, Kazakh SSR
1953–1956 teaches (mathematics and physics) at Kok-Terek secondary school treatment at the Tashkent’cancer ward’
1956 April released from internal exile according to Article 58
1956 June travels to Russia
1956–1957 teaches at a secondary school in Mezinovo, Vladimir region
1957 6 February rehabilitated by the USSR Supreme Court Military Collegium
1957–1962 teaches at School No. 2, Ryazan
1959 May-June writes the short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1961 November the novel is submitted to the Novy Mir journal edited by А. Tvardovsky
1962 November One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is published in the November issue of Novy Mir
1963 January the novellas Matryona’s House and An Incident at Krechetovka Station are published in the January issue of Novy Mir
1965–1968 intermittently writes The Gulag Archipelago
1966 April-May finishes the novel Cancer Ward
1967 May sends an open letter to the Union of Soviet Writers Congress
1968 final editing of the novel The First Circle
1969 March begins writing his historical epic The Red Wheel
1969 November excluded from the Union of Writers
1970 October awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
1971 June Russian publication of August the Fourteenth in Paris
1971 December A. Tvardovsky dies
1970–1973 Solzhenitsyn’s three sons are born
1973 August manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago is confiscated by the KGB
1973 December the first volume of the work is published in Paris
1974 stripped of Soviet citizenship and deported from the USSR
1975 The Oak and the Calf is published in Paris
1976 moves from Zurich to the state of Vermont, USA
1978 Harvard speech
1975–1989 writes The Red Wheel; begins his polemical essays
1989 The Gulag Archipelago is first published in Russia
1990 18 September publication of his essay Rebuilding Russia
1993–1994 finishes Essays from Exile, writes the first’two-part’ short stories
1994 May returns to Russia
1994–1998 travels extensively in the Russian provinces
1998 publishes Russia in Collapse
1998 80th birthday celebrations
1998 premiere of Sharashka at the Taganka Theatre
1998–2003 publishes Two-Part Short Stories and the essays Literary Collection, Two Hundred Years Together and The Grain between the Millstones
2003 international conference entitled ‘Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Problems of Artistic Creativity’ in Moscow
2006 the 30-volume Collected Works begins publication
2007 awarded the State Prize international conference’Alexander Solzhenitsyn as Writer, Mythmaker and Public Figure’ at the University of Illinois (USA)
2007–2008 prepares further volumes of his Collected Works for publication; writes several essays on topical issues

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow on 3 August 2008