It’s the birthday of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008, #nicelonglifeinspiteofallthattimeinsovietprisoncamps), whose works of fiction and nonfiction brought international attention to conditions in the camps under Stalin, and no, we don’t mean summer camp with horseback riding and lanyard making.

Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk in southwestern Russia, six months after his father was killed in a hunting accident. His mother raised him in Rostov-on-Don and supported him by working as a typist and stenographer. Solzhenitsyn was excellent at math and studied math and physics at Rostov University in 1941. He then spent three years serving his country in WWII, becoming a captain of artillery, at the end of which he was arrested by Smersh, which is what the Soviets called their spy agency because the person in charge of naming spy agencies evidently didn’t know how funny it sounded. The arrest was precipitated by a letter in which Solzhenitsyn called Stalin “the man with the mustache.” (Geez. Somebody’s touchy.) Solzhenitsyn did eight years in Soviet labor camps and credited his survival with the fact that three of those years he spent at Special Prison#16, where prisoners who were scientists carried out research under better conditions than in most camps. He later based his novel, The First Circle, on this experience. (The title refers to Dante’s first circle of hell: it’s the best possible place in hell to be, with relative privilege, but it’s still hell. Good novel.)

After prison camp, Solzhenitsyn spent three more years in exile, then moved to central Russia and began teaching math and writing. He wrote the very short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in a prison camp, and it was published in 1962 in a Soviet lit journal and made a huge splash there and abroad—this was post-Stalin—but then Khrushchev fell and Brezhnev came to power (don’t tell me these people with such cool names couldn’t have done better than “Smersh”), and Solzhenitsyn’s work started being suppressed and he himself harassed by the government. (Well, who could have seen that coming?) However, his novels, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, were both published abroad in 1968. (The Cancer Ward is fascinating and was based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experience being treated for supposedly terminal cancer while in exile.) In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize but wouldn’t leave town to accept it, fearing the government would lock the doors on him, but in 1974, shortly after The Gulag Archipelago began to be published, they charged him with treason and kicked him out anyway, which, from my admittedly cushy Western perspective, seems like the most cheerful possible outcome of that situation. In December of that year he finally accepted the Nobel, and ultimately settled in Vermont for the next 18 years.

On a personal note: while in the camps, Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, Natalia, had divorced him; after his release, they remarried. But eventually he met another Natalia (this saved him the trouble of having to learn a new name) and now he divorced Natalia #1 (fair enough) and eventually married Natalia #2. She and their three sons joined him in Vermont, where Solzhenitsyn Kept to Himself to say the least, protected by neighbors and shop owners who hung signs that said,“NO Directions to the Solzhenitsyns.” Solzhenitsyn condemned pretty much all things American during his entire stay, including democracy, preferring the idea of a benevolent authoritarian regime, and I honestly can’t think of a single thing that could go wrong with that plan.

Eventually Russia said, “Okay, we’re sorry,” and in 1994 Solzhenitsyn returned to live there for the rest of his life. Fun fact: his youngest son, Ignat, is a world-renowned pianist and conductor, and I seem to recall while at Oberlin Conservatory running into a fellow student who had once met him at Interlochen Arts Camp, which puts me nowhere near Kevin Bacon but only two degrees from Solzhenitsyn, if you don’t count the fact that I can’t remember who the student was. So there’s that.

Have a benevolent Tuesday and stay, as Solzhenitsyn most impressively did under the greatest of pressures, scrupulously honest to the data.