Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, in the spa town of Kislovodsk in the North Caucasus mountains. His father, a former philology student at Moscow University, had died in World War I six months before his only son's birth. Alexander Isaevich, therefore, was born to a widowed mother in relatively indigent circumstances.
The elder Solzhenitsyn had volunteered from the army, abandoning his course of study in 1914, and he had served as an artillery officer on the German front. He was an officer in the Grenadier Artillery Brigade and a member of a battery that remained on the front lines until the Treaty of Brest. He and Alexander's mother had been married on the...
