Enemy at the Gates portrays the character Vasily Zaytsev, and is based off which book?
Enemy at the Gates Enemy at the Gates is a 2001 French-American war film written and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and based on William Craig's 1973 nonfiction book "", which describes the events surrounding the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 and 1943. The film's main character is a fictionalized version of sniper Vasily Zaytsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union during World War II. It includes a snipers' duel between Zaytsev and a "Wehrmacht" sniper school director, Major Erwin König.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ( ; Russian: Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын , ] ; 11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) (often Romanized to Alexandr or Alexander) was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1962), in the periodical "Novy Mir". After this he had to publish in the West, most notably "Cancer Ward" (1968), "August 1914" (1971), and "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973). Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". Solzhenitsyn was afraid to go to Stockholm to receive his award for fear that he would not be allowed to reenter. He was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1994 after the state's dissolution.