Short answers, pulled from the story.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who lived from the 11th of December 1918 to the 3rd of August 2008. He helped raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system.
Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH in February 1945 for nineteen months of correspondence with his friend Nikolai Vitkevich criticizing the Soviet state and Joseph Stalin's conduct of the war. He was convicted under Article 58 and sentenced on the 7th of July 1945 to an eight-year term in a labour camp.
The Gulag Archipelago is a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, composed from 1958 to 1967. It drew on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences, the testimony of 256 former prisoners, and his research into the Russian penal system, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages.
Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." He received the prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn was arrested on the 12th of February 1974 and deported the next day to Frankfurt, West Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship, after The Gulag Archipelago outraged Soviet authorities. The deportation was decided by the Politburo and guided by KGB chief Yuri Andropov.
Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994, four years after his Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990. He lived in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow until his death on the 3rd of August 2008.