Cancer ward / [print]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn ; translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg.
- New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (c)1991.
- 536 pages ; 21 cm.
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. They are seen 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.