
In Stalin's Soviet Union, the pervading mode of literature was that of socialist realism. In fact, Solzhenitsyn's style of writing and subject matter follows far more closely the tradition of those pre-Revolutionary Russians than the writers, men who wrote at least forty or fifty years before him, than those writers of the 1940s and '50s Soviet Union. Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn follows a long tradition of Russian critical realists - a school which includes nineteenth-century Russians Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Goncharev.
