Quotes from book

Cancer Ward

Cancer Ward is a semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Completed in 1966, the novel was distributed in Russia that year in samizdat, and banned there the following year. In 1968, several European publishers published it in Russian, and in April 1968 excerpts in English appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK without Solzhenitsyn's permission. An unauthorized English translation was published that year, first by The Bodley Head in the UK, then by Dial Press in the US.Cancer Ward tells the story of a small group of patients in Ward 13, the cancer ward of a hospital in Soviet Central Asia in 1955, two years after Joseph Stalin's death. A range of characters are depicted, including those who benefited from Stalinism, resisted or acquiesced. Like Solzhenitsyn, the main character, the Russian Oleg Kostoglotov, spent time in a labour camp as a "counter-revolutionary" before being exiled to Central Asia under Article 58.