Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich

Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev was born in Tbilisi, in Soviet Georgia on November 14, 1925. He received a bachelor's degree from the Timiriasev Academy of Agricultural Sciences, a master's degree from the Institute of Plant Physiology at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and a doctorate in biochemistry from Timiriasev Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1954. He worked at Timiriasev from 1954 until 1963 and with the Academy of Medical Sciences at Obninsk from 1963 until his dismissal in 1969 because he refused to limit his writings to scientific subjects. Medvedev played a role in discrediting the doctrines of Trofim D. Lysenko, gave the world accounts of the Soviet practice of committing political dissenters to mental institutions, campaigned for greater freedoms for Soviet scientists and writers to study and travel abroad, and exposed a 1957 nuclear disaster in the Urals. On May 29, 1970, he was arrested at his home and taken by doctors to a mental hospital. He was pronounced acutely ill and confined in a locked ward. He was released 19 days later because of written protests from both in the Soviet Union and abroad. In 1973, Medvedev was allowed to go to London to take a one-year job at the National Institute for Medical Research. While there, his Soviet citizenship was revoked. In England, he worked at the Department of Genetics of the National Institute for Medical Research. His Soviet citizenship was reinstated in 1990. He wrote numerous books including Protein Biosynthesis and Problems of Heredity, Development and Aging; Molecular-Genetic Mechanisms of Development; The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko; A Question of Madness written with Roy Medvedev; Ten Years After One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Nuclear Disaster in the Urals; Soviet Agriculture; and The Legacy of Chernobyl. He died of a heart attack on November 15, 2018 at the age of 93. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in the northern Caucusus Mountains. He received a degree in physics and math from Rostov University in 1941. He served in the Russian army during World War II but was arrested in 1945 for writing a letter criticizing Stalin. He spent the next decade in prisons and labor camps and, later, exile, before being allowed to return to central Russia, where he worked as a high school science teacher. His first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974, he was arrested for treason and exiled following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. He moved to Switzerland and later the U. S. where he continued to write fiction and history. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he returned to his homeland. His other works include The First Circle and The Cancer Ward. He died due to a heart ailment on August 3, 2008 at the age of 89.