Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

Don't worry about pronouncing the name.  He was (is) one of the Soviet dissident writers and ended up moving to the state of Vermont in the seventies.  If you ever need to go into exile, Vermont is a good place-whoever you're running from will never find you among the trees.  His work is very literary, meaning very long-winded, so be warned-some of these books get really wordy, and most of them are a hard plunge.  One of the easier ones is A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about life in Stalin's prison camps, which was actually published in the Soviet Union during a brief ani-Stalinist backlash in the fifties.  In this case, I think you really do have to be interested in Soviet society to get through his books, so once again, be warned.

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