Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn died late on August 3, international news agencies quoted Itar-Tass as saying. Solzhenitsyn was 89. He died at 11.45pm of heart failure, Itar-Tass quoted his son as saying.

He was said to have suffered from high blood pressure in recent years.

Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 for his major works, including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward". His most celebrated works "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich", "The First Circle" and "The Gulag Archipelago" deal with life in the Galug, where he had spent eight years for criticising Stalin in a letter.

In 1974 he became a Cold War icon when he was expelled from the Soviet Union.

He lived in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. In 1994 he returned to Russia. In the same year, he was elected as a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.

In June 2007 he was awarded the e State Prize of the Russian Federation, Russia's highest honour, for his humanitarian work, by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who praised his devotion to the fatherland.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences to the writer's family, the BBC quoted a Kremlin spokesperson as saying.