Alexander solzhenitsyn wikipedia biography

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, , in the spa town of Kislovodsk in the North Caucausus mountains. His father, a former philology student at Moscow University, had died in World War I six months before his only son's birth. Alexander Isaevich, therefore, was born to a widowed mother in relatively indigent circumstances.

The elder Solzhenitsyn had volunteered from the army, abandoning his course of study, in and had served as an artillery officer on the German front.

Aleksandr solzhenitsyn nobel prize

He was an officer in the Grenadier Artillery Brigade and a member of a battery that remained on the front lines until the Treaty of Brest. He and Alexander's mother had been married on the front lines by a brigade priest. Though he returned home from the war in the spring of , he died soon after as the result of an accident and poor medical care.

Solzhenitsyn's mother never remarried, partially because of her fear that a new husband would be too strict a step-father to her son. She was an educated woman, fluent in French and English, and supported herself and her son by working as a typist and stenographer. Beginning in , the two lived in Rostov-on-Don. They were forced to rent rooms and huts from private owners because the state did not provide them with a room.

After fifteen years, they were finally given a drafty room in a reconstructed stable.