"I could not have invented my life better than it invented itself.... All I had to do was take possession of it to write about it." So says Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Laureate who has lived the terrible hardships of his landmark novels. In this gripping program, key figures such as Andrei Vassilievsky, the editor of Novy Mir; Nikita Struve, the first publisher of The Gulag Archipelago; and Solzhenitsyn himself, in a rare interview, discuss the events that have both stimulated and shaped a perilous lifetime of writing. Extracts from Archipelago and The Oak and the Calf drive home the harsh realities of life in the U.S.S.R. during the Stalin and Brezhnev regimes. (49 minutes)