One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Week 2: Pages 33-68
After reading this weeks section, I have been wondering what the author himself is like. So I have decided to research a little bit about the author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia in 1918. And he died in Moscow, Russia in 2008. He was a Soviet and Russia novelist, historian, and dramatist. "Through his writings he helped to make the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system - particularly The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich two of his best-known works" (goodreads).
I also have been curious about what the Gulag camps (labor camps) were like. So I have decided to do some research on that also.
"Concentration camps were created in the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 revolution, but the system grew to tremendous proportions during the course of Stalin's campaign to turn the Soviet Union in to a modern industrial power and to collectivise agriculture in the early 1930s" (gulag history). Gulag camps existed all over the Soviet Union. But they started to decrease in size after Stalin's death in 1953. However, forced labor camps and political prisoners still existed in the Soviet Union.
Lexi,
ReplyDeleteGreat research and interesting facts included! As I finished reading your post, I found interesting the fact that you researched the author. In my opinion, I would as well research about the author for one main reason. The first reason is because knowing some background information about Alexander Solzhenitsyn would help me understand why he wrote a book about this specific topic. For example, something that I said in my blog post was that his personal experiences might have influenced the decision on which topic he should write about. Specifically, the fact that "through his writings he helped to make the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system - particularly The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich two of his best-known works" made me think what had guided him to create awareness?