The epitome of a socially involved writer, one-time dissident Russian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, became a symbol of Soviet intolerance during the cold war, being forced to leave his native Russia because of his writings, ultimately to find a home in the United States. A resident in the West for almost two decades, Solzhenitsyn was no propagandist for Western values. Instead, during his sojourn in the United States, he was critical of the consumer society that seemed to him to drive the culture of the nation. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was able, in 1994, to once again return to the country of his birth, a hero to the people. Yet again, he refused to merely rest on laurels, but took a vocal and critical look at the new Russia with as much bite as he did its Soviet predecessor.

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