Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk.1 His parents, both of whom were of peasant stock and were the first in their families to gain an education, were married in August 1917 at the front, where the writer’s father was a second lieutenant in an artillery brigade. In 1914 he had left Moscow University in order to enlist in the military in WWI, putting in three-and-a-half years of service and returning to the Kuban region in early 1918. He died as a result of a hunting accident six months before the birth of his son. The writer’s mother raised the boy by herself in hardscrabble circumstances, living in drafty tumble-down shacks that had to be heated with coal and needed water to be carried in by bucket.

Sanya, as the boy was called at home, read a great deal and, strange to say, at the age of eight or nine decided that he had to become a writer, though of course he had no real understanding of what this might entail. His childhood and youth were spent in Rostov-on-Don. Upon graduating from a local secondary school, he enrolled in Rostov University, majoring in mathematics and physics, combining this with a correspondence course in literature at Moscow’s Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature. The outbreak of the war with Nazi Germany found him in Moscow at the beginning of a summer session at this institute. Joining the military as a private, he completed a short-term course