Product Description
Cancer Ward
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Format: Paperback
Oleg Kostoglotov arrives at Ward 13 after years of exile, carrying the scars of imprisonment and the fear of what his cancer diagnosis will mean.
Taking place in the Soviet Union in 1956 during the Khrushchev Thaw, Cancer Ward gathers patients from across society in a provincial hospital. Former Party officials lie beside political exiles, each confronting illness while reckoning with the compromises demanded under Stalinist repression.
As treatments strip away pride and certainty, Oleg questions the loyalty, silence and fear that shaped his life in the camps. Conversations in the ward expose betrayal, survival, and the moral cost of obedience.
As post-Stalin historical fiction, Cancer Ward turns a hospital into a portrait of a wounded state, revealing how political terror lingers long after the dictator's death.
'Solzhenitsyn is one of the towering figures of the age, as a writer, as moralist, as hero' — Edward Crankshaw
About the Author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in Physics and Mathematics from Rostov University and studied Literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing, in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008.
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