Moscow - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author who turned the world's attention to the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, was announced Tuesday as the recipient of one of Russia's most esteemed government-connected honours. The Russian State Prize for work in the humanities will be awarded to Solzhenitsyn next week in accordance with an order signed by President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said.
Solzhenitsyn, 88, is known worldwide for his Soviet-era classics One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. The latter, a history of the Soviet Union's prison-camp system, led to Solzhenitsyn's exile from his homeland in 1974.
In announcing that Russia's best-known living author was to receive the prize, Yury Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called Solzhenitsyn "the author of works without which the history of the 20th century is unthinkable," Interfax reported.
Solzhenitsyn, who returned to Russia in 1994 after the fall of the Soviet Union, did not attend the announcement in Moscow's Kremlin, but his wife Natalya said the writer hoped his study of Russia's history would help the country in the future.
The prize, she said, "gives a certain hope, and Alexander Isayevich (Solzhenitsyn) would be glad if that hope came to life, a hope our country will learn the lesson of its self-destruction in the 20th century and not repeat it," Interfax reported.
The State Prize's origins date back to Soviet times, but Solzhenitsyn will be just the second to receive the prize for work in the humanities.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexiy II last year received the first such prize.
