Solzhenitsyn the restless chronicler of labour camps

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian literary giant Alexander Solzhenitsyn, opened the eyes of the world to the brutality of Stalin's labour camps with searing writings that brought him the wrath of the Soviet authorities and years of persecution.

He went from outcast to hero, in a life whose suffering and triumph reflected the upheavals of 20th century Russia itself.

Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, was a driven chronicler of Russian history, drawing on his blackest moments in dictator Josef Stalin's camps for his most memorable works.

In a life of extraordinary swings of fortune, he served with the Red Army, endured eight years in the Soviet Gulag, beat cancer and in 1970, still hounded by the communist authorities, won the Nobel Prize for literature.

He spent 20 years of unhappy and forced exile in the West whose materialistic values he never ceased to denounce.

By the time he made a hero's return to Russia in 1994, it was to a challenging new country that -- to his regret -- was espousing those same values and which he barely recognised.

The sometimes Messianic figure, with the mien of a biblical prophet, was an icon of resistance to communism in the Cold War.

But his pan-Slav nationalist views, his mystical passion for Russia and fervour for Russian Orthodoxy, and charges of anti-Semitism that dogged him, made him difficult to categorise.

He remained a rebel into his 80s, railing against Kremlin policies in the new Russia and what he saw as the loss of the Russian nation to moral and spiritual decay.

He refused to accept a high state award from Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia's first president. He said he could not accept honours from a leader who brought misery to his people.

But he took the award from Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, whom he chided for not curbing the powers of corrupt politicians.

In a television appearance in June 2005, a frail-looking Solzhenitsyn, bemoaned the state of politics in Russia. "We have nothing that resembles democracy," he said.

ARMY SERVICE, LABOUR CAMPS, CANCER

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, a year after the Bolshevik revolution, and raised in Southern Russia. He studied physics and mathematics until Hitler's forces attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 and he became a frontline artillery captain, twice decorated for bravery.

In 1945 military censors found letters to a friend in which he criticised Stalin. That cost him eight years' detention in the Gulag camps, where tens of millions people have perished.

Because of his mathematics background he was moved to a secret research institute -- recreated in his work "The First Circle" -- and in 1950 to labour camps in the Kazakh steppes.