Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature whose pitiless and searching chronicles of Soviet tyranny made him a symbol of freedom and the durability of the human spirit, died on Sunday in Moscow. He was 89.

Driven, principled, frequently arrogant, a bearded figure with the fierce visage of a prophet, Solzhenitsyn was regarded as one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century.

Like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the 19th century masters of Russian letters, his subject was considered to be the struggle between good and evil in the Russian soul.

The line separating the two, he said, ran through every heart.
His text was the nightmare of Marxism-Leninism and he exposed its flaws in ways from which it never recovered.

The task he set for himself was no less than restoring to the Russian people the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent years of communism that had been kept from them by their leaders.

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The Gulag Archipelago, his acknowledged masterpieces, and a vast outpouring of other works, he chronicled the sufferings of his countrymen and bore lasting witness to the fate of millions of otherwise forgotten victims of Soviet misrule.

Literature, he declared in his Nobel lecture, “is the living memory of a nation. It sustains within itself and safeguards a nation's bygone history.''

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Solzhenitsyn struggled against the Soviet leadership. In 1974, he was charged with treason and exiled to the West, where he received a hero's welcome, although his attacks on Western culture and politics drew detractors. After leaving the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn lived in Zurich, then in Cavendish, Vermont, where he spent what he described as some of his happiest years, working in peace in surroundings that reminded him of home.

In 1994, having completed The Red Wheel, a massive series of historical novels on the Russian Revolution, he returned to his beloved Russia.

Cross-country trip

Received as a national treasure, he made a triumphant whistle-stop cross-country train trip. But in later TV appearances he was viewed as gloomy and out of touch, and he retreated to his Moscow home.

A member of the first generation to be raised entirely under communism, Solzhenitsyn had experienced in his life much of what he related in his books.

As a young man he was a communist in heart and soul, though he never joined the party. He had a brilliant career at Rostov State University, studying physics and mathematics, and won a Stalin scholarship. Through correspondence courses he earned a degree in literature from the University of Moscow.

During Second World War, he was a decorated captain in the Red Army. But in 1945, while at the front, he was arrested on a charge of anti-Soviet activity for mildly critical remarks about Stalin in letters to a boyhood friend. He served eight years in labour camps and three more years in exile in a remote corner of Soviet Central Asia.

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By J.Y. Smith, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

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Russian icon, Solzhenitsyn, dies at 89