Obituary: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008

Russia went into mourning last week after the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize-winning writer and dissident who devoted his life to exposing the horrors of Stalin's police state and prison system.

Famous for his works based upon his own experiences inside the Soviet GULAG that included A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), and The GULAG Archipelago (1973), Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure at his country home near Moscow late on 3 August.

... In recent years, Solzhenitsyn worked on editing his 30-volume collected works and also wrote the script for a television adaptation of his chronicle of prison life The First Circle, which state channel Rossiya ran without commercial breaks in 2006.

Actor Yevgeny Mironov, who played the character based on Solzhenitsyn in the TV drama, paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn last week during extended television news coverage of the writer's death.

Solzhenitsyn had "fulfilled a mission to protect and save the Russian people" and had "touched the lives of all those who had lived through his times," Mironov said, adding that Russia and Russians would never forget the great writer.

For a man whose books became required reading for many university students across the free world during the 1970s and '80s – and in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – it was fitting that Solzhenitsyn's last public event was his lying in state at the Russian Academy of Sciences on 5 August, the day before his burial in Moscow's 16th century Donskoi Monastery.