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Russia marks 90 years since birth of Solzhenitsyn

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Russia marked on Thursday what would have been the 90th birthday of Soviet dissident and Nobel literature prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn with a series of events, including the opening of website dedicated to his work.
MOSCOW, December 11 (RIA Novosti) - Russia marked on Thursday what would have been the 90th birthday of Soviet dissident and Nobel literature prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn with a series of events, including the opening of website dedicated to his work.

Solzhenitsyn, who fought in WWII, spent eight years in labor camps, and lived in exile for 20 years before returning to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, died of heart failure in August.

The Russian-language website dedicated to Solzhenitsyn includes biographical data, photo archives and links to many of his works.

Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalia, said all the writer's works would hopefully be published on the site with time. She also thanked the Russian government for helping to create the site.

Thursday also saw the release of three MP3 audio books read by Solzhenitsyn.

"An author's reading is a special experience," the president of the Soyuz publishers, Vladimir Vorobyov, said. "We know the background behind some of Solzhenitsyn's works. [One Day in the Life of] Ivan Denisovich, for example, was conceived of in the camps, where writing was forbidden, and he had to recite it to himself aloud every day."

Other events include a theater production in Moscow and the world premiere in London of a Russian movie, both based on Solzhenitsyn's autobiographical novel, The First Circle.

The novel is based around the lives of Gulag prison inmates working in Moscow's suburbs, many of who are technicians and academics arrested during Joseph Stalin's purges after WWII.

Best known for his Gulag Archipelago, a chronicle of his and thousands of other people's experiences in Soviet labor camps, Solzhenitsyn first came to acclaim in Russia and the world during Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's political "thaw." In 1962, his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - a numbing account of gulag life - was published by the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir.

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