Recommended Reading

Quicklinks: By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Web Resources | For Kids and Teens

Selected Works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
• For the Good of the Cause (1963)
• Matryona’s House (1963)
• The First Circle (1968)
• The Cancer Ward (1968)
• The Love-Girl and the Innocent (1969)
• August 1914 (1971)
• The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes) (1973-78)
• Prussian Nights (1974)
• Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974)
• The Oak and the Calf (1975)
• Lenin in Zurich (1976)
• A World Split Apart (1979)
• The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America (1980)
• November 1916 (1983)
• Victory Celebration (1983)
• Prisoners (1983)
• Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals (1990)
• March 1917 (1986)
• April 1917 (1991)
• Invisible Allies (1992)
• The Russian Question Toward the End of the Century (1995)

Web Resources

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
The Nobel Prize site includes an autobiographical statement by Solzhenitsyn and his Nobel lecture in English and Russian.

A World Split Apart
Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address to the Harvard University graduating class of 1978.

For Kids and Teens

These powerful books present experiences by teenagers who must deal with injustice while finding ways to maintain their identity, dignity and hope in adverse situations. Unless otherwise noted, they are appropriate for ages 13 and up.

Black and White
By Paul Volponi
Viking, 2005
Two basketball-playing best friends each encounter the criminal justice system differently while facing difficult questions of camaraderie and social equality in a contemporary urban setting.

Holes
By Louis Sachar
Frances Foster, 1998 (Ages 10-14)
Stanley Yelnats is falsely accused of stealing a pair of shoes and sent off to a rehabilitation camp, where he learns about friendship, suffering and justice, in this modern classic.

The Rag and Bone Shop
By Robert Cormier
Delacorte, 2001
This thought-provoking novel presents the story of Jason, a young man in the midst of losing his innocence, and Trent, the interrogator whose job it is to make Jason confess to a crime he did not commit.

Monster
By Walter Dean Myers
Amistad, 1999
Aspiring filmmaker Steve Harmon, harshly dubbed “Monster” by those prosecuting and persecuting him, documents his experience as an accused murderer in the unique and expressive form of a movie script.

Siberia: A Novel
By Ann Halam
Wendy Lamb, 2005
Sloe’s family was unjustly imprisoned when she was 11 years old, and after living with hunger, fear and almost unbearable cold for two years, she leaves her prison school and treks across the wasteland, finding responsibility she never expected.