Cancer Ward: A Novel

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nov. 1991 · Verkauft von Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Cancer Ward examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. We see them under normal circumstances, and also reexamined at the eleventh hour of illness. Together they represent a remarkable cross-section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes. The experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own: Solzhenitsyn himself became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered. Translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg.

Autoren-Profil

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was serving the Soviet Army in 1945 when he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, later cut short by Khrushchev's reforms. Although permitted to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers' Union in 1969. The Western publication of his other novels, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, brought retaliation: in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and forcibly flown to Frankfurt. In 1991, the Soviet government dismissed treason charges against him, and Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994.