Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died.

Along with Elie Wiesel's book Night, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch showed the horrors of Hitler's and Stalin's regimes to the world. After criticizing Stalin in a letter in 1945, Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in a Russian gulag as punishment. He was a literary celebrity after publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch but then found himself out of favor again and by 1974 he was stripped of citizenship and expelled from Russia. His death yesterday was heralded as a huge loss for literature worldwide.

And here’s the TIME magazine story and the The New York Times obit.