BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhuanet)-- The Russian novelist and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure at his Moscow home late Sunday at age of 89, media reports said Monday.

    Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 for "The First Circle." He did not attend the Nobel ceremony for fear that he would not be allowed back into the Soviet Union.

    He was stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago," which unveiled the conditions in the Soviet prison camps, where he spent eight years from 1945.

    Solzhenitsyn then moved to the United States, where he accepted an invitation to teach at Stanford University in California, then later moved to the woods of Cavendish, Vermont, where he lived with his family for several years.

    In 1990, his citizenship was restored and he moved back to Russia. In June last year, then Russian president Vladimir Putin awarded Solzhenitsyn the State Prize, Russia's highest honour, praising his devotion to the "fatherland" in a lavish ceremony at the Kremlin.

    Speaking via a video message, Solzhenitsyn said he was "flattered by the attention to my work brought by this Russian State Prize."

    "Until the end of my life I can hope that the historical material... collected by me and presented to my readers, enters the consciousness and memory of my fellow countrymen," he said.

    A complete edition of Solzhenitsyn's works, including unpublished writings, began to be published in 2006, with the last volume due out in 2010.

    Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev has sent the family his condolences.

(Agencies)