This paper discusses the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's (1918-) views on exile. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the United States of America in 1974 and returned to the erstwhile Soviet Union after its break-up. Unlike most émigrés who normally reflect a blind fascination for their homeland, Solzhenitsyn maintained a balance between his attitude towards Russia and the West. This paper explores Solzhenitsyn's dialogic manner of thinking about the problems faced by the two nations and cultures. The subject position, he takes, poses a difficulty in fixing Solzhenitsyn's standpoint—the extent to which he is for or against both Russia and the West. It is this view of Solzhenitsyn that makes him a `Man of Letters', one who can contribute towards the rebuilding of contemporary Russia in the present context of globalization.

Exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you. But, provided that the exile refuses to sit on the sidelines nursing a wound, there are things to be learned: he or she must cultivate a scrupulous (not indulgent or sulky) subjectivity….

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's expulsion to the West in 1974 marks the beginning of the latter phase of his life and career as a writer. The earlier phase of Solzhenitsyn, living and writing within the boundaries of the former Soviet Union, is a typical case of a genuine artist in confrontation with the prevailing oppressive official forces. It is inevitably hampered by arrests, periods of hiding from the authorities, problems of illegal, underground publishing (Samizdat), censorship, hostile reviews, and of exclusion from the `mainstream' literature represented by the Union of Soviet Writers. Finally, there are Solzhenitsyn's eight years of prison life and three years of exile, which take on the ominous shape of "perpetual exile" to use his own words in Cancer Ward. The twin factors of prison and exile are very crucial, bearing down on Solzhenitsyn's entire being, touchingly metamorphosed into his creative works.

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