Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008)[2] was a Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his writings he made 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, his two best-known works. For these efforts Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. He was the father of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.