In his lecture of acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn quoted a Russian proverb: "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world." Those words succinctly encapsulated his literary creed. In a country where autocratic leadership had long obliged the populace to seek more inspiring government, Solzhenitsyn, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Akhmatova before him, became a vital source of spiritual succour to his huge circle of readers.

Despite the ban imposed on all his works after the publication of his masterly A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich (1962), he was very widely read - in photocopied form - in his native Russia. He was also the only Russian writer to achieve the best-seller lists in the West, and sold more than 30 million books in more than 30 languages.

Not that fame or fortune held much temptation for Solzhenitsyn. A big, loose-limbed figure, with an awesome Old Testament visage and booming voice, he was a serious, ascetic individual, even something of a masochist, who distinguished himself, even among his long-suffering compatriots, with his capacity for enduring emotional and physical pain.

He spent much of his life in confinement - both enforced and self-imposed. Indeed, having been a prisoner in his own country, he was scarcely consoled by the fruits of life in the United States.

After being expelled from Russia, where he survived nearly a decade in Stalin's Gulag Archipelago, he emigrated to America - only to shut himself behind barbed-wire-topped walls in a remote mountain village in Vermont, the better to maintain his punishing working regimen.

Each year on February 9 he commemorated the day of his first arrest in 1945, by having a "convict's day", rationing himself to the diet he had in the camps, 65 grams of bread, a bowl of broth and a ladle of oats.

America was perhaps an ill-chosen destination for a man of Solzhenitsyn's stern moral temperament. If he had despised the heavy-handed Soviet rule, he came to loathe the West's "smug hedonism" in almost equal measure. Ever since he had stepped off the Aeroflot plane in West Berlin in 1974, Solzhenitsyn had made it clear that his last wish was to be allowed to die in his homeland.

For years, his dedicated supporters predicted a glorious homecoming - an event comparable to that of Jesus riding back into Jerusalem, or even Pope John Paul II's triumphant journey back to Poland. When the return finally came, though, in 1994, it was a relatively subdued affair. That he chose to take the long, uncomfortable way home, travelling on the Trans-Siberian railway, was characteristic - as Solzhenitsyn explained, he wanted to meet "simple people and have private conversations which are not listened to".

But that his arrival was greeted by only limited crowds, made up mainly of tearful, rapturous babushkas - the only generation which had first-hand experience of Solzhenitsyn's inspiring example - must have rankled just a little. After so many years of gruelling preparation, the "Prophet" had returned to find modern Russia gasping for all the frivolous material aspects of Western life he most despised.

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in the thick of the civil war at Kislovodsk, in the Caucasus in southern Russia, on December 11, 1918. His father, an artillery officer who fought throughout World War I in the imperial Russian army, was killed in a hunting accident six months before his son was born. And young Alexander was brought up in a ramshackle cabin behind the city jail, at Rostov-on-Don.

Even as a schoolboy he knew that he would be a writer. According to his own account, he read War And Peace in its entirety aged 10. He was certainly an exceptional student. But it was mathematics, rather than literature, that he went on to study at Rostov University.

Meanwhile, he switched faiths, throwing out Christianity in favour of Marxism, by which he professed himself "absolutely sincerely enthralled" - and this in spite of the fact that, at 14, he had witnessed his substitute father, an engineer friend of the family, being dragged off in the first spate of purges, and some of his father's relatives, too, denounced and exiled to Siberia.

At university Solzhenitsyn was awarded a Stalinist scholarship for his keen work in the communist youth league, and, before long, political and academic commitments so consumed him that during his courtship of his future wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya, he could only spare an hour late at night, after the libraries closed at 10, for their trysts.

When war broke out between the Soviet Union and Germany in 1941, Solzhenitsyn volunteered for the Red Army. He was a successful soldier - twice decorated for gallantry. It therefore came as a terrible shock when he was arrested, in January 1945.

The astonished young Marxist was shipped back to Moscow, where he was sentenced without trial to eight years in labour camps, and exile in perpetuity - apparently for having criticised Stalin's policies in a letter to a friend.

In 1947, he was transferred to Marfino prison, a penal scientific research institute in Moscow, on which he would later model the "Mavrina" prison of his novel The First Circle (1968).

His refusal to co-operate with the institute's research projects probably accounted for his relocation, in 1950, to a hard labour camp in Kazakhstan. There he laboured in some of the harshest conditions the Soviet climate could provide. Nonetheless, he managed to write, using tiny scraps of paper which he destroyed after committing their contents to memory. These tracts would eventually make up his first "camp" novel, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

On the day of Stalin died, March 5, 1953, Solzhenitsyn was released from prison, having served his eight-year term. Subsequently, in exile in southern Kazakhstan, he was allowed to teach mathematics and physics at a rural school.

In retrospect, this was one of the most tranquil and productive, if not exactly happy, periods of his life, during which he wrote voraciously in secret in his spare time.

But then a cancerous growth returned. On his way to Tashkent for radiation therapy, he fully expected to die, and he regarded his recovery as a miracle.

The successful outcome of the operation did not prevent the onset of severe depression, and over the next few years he poured torrential anguish into his writing: besides creating new works, he transcribed many of the plays and poems he had composed and memorised while in the camps.

The accession of Nikita Khrushchev to the leadership in the mid-1950s marked a gentler era in Soviet politics, and Solzhenitsyn was one of many persecuted citizens to benefit. In 1956, after his conviction was formally annulled, he moved to Ryazan, where he worked as a teacher by day and wrote by night.

Until the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party in 1961 heralded a cultural thaw, Solzhenitsyn had worked under the assumption that none of his writings would ever be published. He nevertheless felt compelled to keep at it, if only because, as he later put it: "When you've been pitched head-first into hell you just write about it."

Now, finally, it all seemed worthwhile. When he submitted the manuscript of Ivan Denisovich to the literary monthly Novy Mir it was accepted enthusiastically by the editor, who arranged for it to be submitted to the Kremlin

for approval.

Its publication in 1962 was a major event in the Soviet Union, and made its writer famous overnight. He was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers and hailed in Pravda as a "true helper of the party" in the "sacred and vital cause" of

de-Stalinisation. Within a year the book was translated into all the major European languages, and met with almost universal praise.

But in 1964 Khrushchev was ousted, de-Stalinisation was curtailed, and Solzhenitsyn came under suspicion.

In the following year, before it could be published, the manuscript of The First Circle, as well as Solzhenitsyn's archives were confiscated by police, in what the writer later referred to as "the greatest misfortune" of his

life so far.

Solzhenitsyn, by now a seasoned self-publicist, set about countering the state's smear campaign with angry letters to President Leonid Brezhnev. In 1967 he addressed a moving appeal to the Writers' Union to defend literary freedom. But he was soon beaten into silence, and, moving to a small cabin at Obninsk, outside Moscow, withdrew into himself and his next work, The Gulag Archipelago.

In the meantime, his reputation continued to grow abroad, following publication in the West of both The Cancer Ward and

The First Circle.

The Gulag Archipelago, his first non-fiction work, confirmed he was not so much a lyrical narrator

as a brilliant chronicler of

historical detail.

This huge documentation of the Soviet system of mass police terror from 1918 to 1956 was based on intense research conducted during his 11 years in prisons, camps

and exile.

In contrast to his novels, which focused on the Stalinist terror, the book struck at the still officially idolised figure of Lenin. Rejecting the Kremlin's thesis that Stalin alone was responsible for the "excesses" of his time, Solzhenitsyn devastatingly demonstrated that the imprisonment of millions under Stalin was only made possible by Lenin's establishment of a ruthless police state.

In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was "amazed" to discover that he was to father a child with another woman, also called Natalya. He had refused his wife the luxury of motherhood - in the belief that a child would divert his energies from his writing mission. Moreover, ever since his radiation therapy, he had deemed himself sterile.

The birth of his first son - which he treated as a gift from God - sufficed to transform his prejudice against procreation, and, after obtaining a divorce, he married Natalya II, who, though stronger and more sophisticated than his first wife, was also apparently prepared to subordinate herself to her husband's work.

At the climax of Solzhenitsyn's struggle with the Soviet authorities - which was further aggravated by the award of the Nobel Prize - she declared herself willing to sacrifice, if pushed, the lives of her children - she had since given birth to another son - for the good of his cause.

In the event such drastic measures were not necessary. By the early 1970s Solzhenitsyn was an internationally celebrated symbol of resistance, whose status inhibited the Soviet authorities from taking the fatal action which befell many lesser known citizens at the time.

But, with the publication of the Gulag in the West in 1973, the Soviet authorities resolved to take action to silence him. Fearing that a trial and another prison sentence would serve only to provoke worldwide protest and damage the policy of East-West detente, the Kremlin decided to expel him from the country, in the hope that, once abroad, his voice would begin to pall and his authority decline.

In a sense, perhaps, this gamble paid off. For, although the exile's influence initially only grew in the imaginations of those Russians left behind, after the Cold War it seemed that the more he said and wrote, the less his voice was heard - as his final return home testified.

Telegraph, London

WHAT THEY SAID

'He fought for Russia not only to move away from its totalitarian past but also to have a worthy future, to become a truly free and democratic country.'

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

the last head of state of the USSR

'We will remember him as a strong, brave person with enormous dignity.'

VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russian Prime Minister

'His intransigence, his ideals and his long, eventful life make of Solzhenitsyn a storybook figure, heir to Dostoyevsky.'

NICOLAS SARKOZY, French President

'He worked yesterday just like any other day. Then in the evening, death came quickly … I express gratitude to everyone who will remember … Solzhenitsyn.'

STEPAN SOLZHENITSYN, son