“It makes me happier, more secure, to think that I do not have to plan and manage everything for myself, that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them.Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand!”

Soviet and Russian author and dissident

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident. He is known for drawing world attention to political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system, and for receiving the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. His nonfiction book The Gulag Archipelago confronted the Soviet state directly and reached a vast readership. The work made his critique of repression widely known and confirmed his place as a major voice in Russian letters.