Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), in the periodical Novy Mir. After this, he had to publish in the West, most notably Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".[6] Solzhenitsyn was afraid to go to Stockholm to receive his award for fear that he would not be allowed to reenter. He was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the state's dissolution.
July 1, 1975 - Forum re-broadcasts a speech by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The exiled Soviet author made his first major public address in the United States at a banquet in his honor given by the AFL-CIO. Solzhenitsyn ‘s address was titled “Words of Warning to the Western World (aka America: You Must Think About The World).”
November 20, 1973 - Produced with the encouragement of the late Robert Weaver, this Options program is a unique survey of Solzhenitsyn's work, with dramatic excerpts from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and the voice of the author reading his own poetry (recorded clandestinely in his garden in Moscow before he emigrated to the U. S.).
March 4, 1973 - On this Forum program, Paul Scofield reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn acceptance speech for Nobel Prize in Literature.