Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Red Wheel epic, The Oak and the Calf, and the two-volume Between Two Millstones memoir (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018 and 2020).

Marian Schwartz is a prizewinning translator of classic and contemporary Russian literature, including works by Leo Tolstoy, Nina Berberova, Olga Slavnikova, and Leonid Yuzefovich.