Cancer Ward

The Russian Nobelist's semiautobiographical novel set in a Soviet cancer ward shortly after Stalin's death
One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, "Cancer Ward" is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the cancerous Soviet police state.
"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 then 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: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered.