The most significant events in the history of books on the 11th of December
1918: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is born. This Russian novelist wrote a number of important works of fiction which reflect life in the Soviet Union, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). He was allowed to publish only one of his novels, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the Soviet Union, with the rest of his novels being published elsewhere. Solzhenitsyn was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.