Which Russian writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and is best known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?

• A. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• B. Gabriel García Márquez
• C. Leo Tolstoy
• D. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Answer: (A)

Solzhenitsyn is the author who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and is best known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a 1962 novella that follows a single day in a Soviet labor camp to reveal the harsh realities of the Gulag and the resilience of the human spirit. The Nobel recognition in 1970 highlighted his courageous critique of totalitarian oppression and his insistence on bearing witness through literature. Gabriel García Márquez is known for magical realism and won the prize later, in 1982. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky are towering 19th-century Russian writers whose major works come from long before the Nobel Prize era.