Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Books In Order

Publication Order of The Red Wheel Books

Publication Order of The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Plays

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RFSR (what is now Stavropol Krai, Russia) on December 11, 1918 and was a Soviet and Russian novelist, historian, and dramatist. His dad was of Russian and his mom, Taisiya Zakharovna, was of Ukranian descent. His father was killed in a hunting accident just after her pregnancy was confirmed, so Aleksandr was raised by his aunt and widowed mom in lowly circumstances.

His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By the year 1930 the family property was turned into a collective farm. Later on, he recalled that his mom fought for survival and that they needed to keep his dad’s background in the old Imperial Army secret. His educated mom, who never remarried, encouraged his scientific and literary learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith.

By as early as 1936, he began developing the concepts and characters for his planned epic work on the Russian Revolution and World War One. This eventually led to the novel “August 1914”, with some of the chapters that he wrote still surviving.

He studied physics and mathematics at Rostov State University. At this time he was also taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History.

During the Second World War, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, got involved in some major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on July 8, 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counter-battery fire onto them, which resulted in their being destroyed.

During his time serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, he was arrested by the SMERSH and then sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile because he criticized Josef Stalin in a private letter.

On April 7, 1940, while at university, he married his first wife, named Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just slightly more than a year of married life before he went into the army and then to the Gulag. In 1952, only a year before he was released, they divorced because the wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of residence permits or work. They remarried in 1957, after his exile ended, but divorced a second time in 1972.

That next year, he married a mathematician that had a son from a prior marriage, named Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova. Together they had three sons: Yermolai, Ignat, and Stepan. His son Ignat was a pianist and a conductor.

He spent a total of eight years in labor camps and prisons, after which he spent three more years in an enforced exile. By 1956, he was considered rehabilitated, and was allowed to settle in Ryazan, located in central Russia, where he became a math teacher and started writing.

Encouraged by the loosening of government restraints on cultural life, which was a hallmark of the de-Stalinizing policies of the early sixties, he submitted his short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” to the leading literary periodical New World. It was met with immediate popularity and Aleksandr became an instant celebrity as a result.

The novel, which was based off his own experiences, described the usual day in the life of an inmate of a forced labor camp during the Stalin era. The impression that it made on the public with its direct and simple language and obvious authority that it treated the day to day struggles and the material hardships of camp life was magnified even more because it was one of the first Soviet literary works of the post-Stalin era to describe in a direct way this sort of a life.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 1970 “for the ethical force with which he’s pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. Aleksandr also won a Templeton Prize in the year 1983, and in 2007 was awarded Russia’s prestigious State Prize for his contribution to humanitarian causes. His “The Gulag Archipelago” sold tens of millions of copies and was a very influential work which amounted to a head on challenge to the Soviet State.

In the year 1974 he was exiled out of the Soviet Union and, once his citizenship was restored in the year 1990, he returned to Russia in the year 1994, where he remained for the rest of his life. While here, he made many public appearances and met privately with Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

In the year 1997, he established a yearly prize for writers that contributed to the Russian literary tradition.

He died of heart failure on August 3, 2008 at the age of 89 in Moscow, Russia.

“For the Good of the Cause” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 1964. Pride within the technical school is running high while they near completion on the new building on the campus. The sense of accomplishment is deepened by the fact that these students built this new building themselves with their own two hands.

Fyodor, the man that is in charge of the school, gets suspicious when the school is not instantly able to occupy this building. With further investigation, he finds that a new research institute is going to occupy this building. He asks why and only is told that it is for the good of the cause.

“The Cancer Ward” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 1968. This novel examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in the year 1955, two years after Stalin has died. We see them under some normal circumstances, and also examined again during the eleventh hour of their illness.

Together they represent a remarkable cross-section of contemporary Russian attitudes and characters. The experiences of Oleg Kostoglotov, the central character, closely reflects that of the author, as Solzhenitsyn became a patient in a cancer ward himself during the mid-fifties, after his release from a labor camp, and later recovered.