Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the stubborn dissident who outlasted the Soviet Union, has died at age 89.
His 1962 book A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a Soviet prison camp inmate, made him both famous and a favorite target of government authorities. (A mathematician and professor, he had already spent a decade in prison camps and then in exile in Kazakhstan.)
Solzhenitsyn persevered and won the 1970 Nobel Prize, “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”