Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, 11 December 1918 - 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. After two years in Germany and Switzerland, he settled in Vermont in 1976. He returned to Russia in 1994. In 1994, he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.