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  • Published: 31 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448114467
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 576

Cancer Ward




'Without a doubt the greatest Russian novelist' Sunday Times

FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

‘Solzhenitsyn is one of the towering figures of the age, as a writer, as moralist, as hero’ Edward Crankshaw

After years in enforced exile on the Kazakhstan steppes, a cancer diagnosis brings Oleg Kostoglotov to Ward 13. Brutally treated in squalid conditions, and faced with ward staff and other patients from across the Soviet Union, Kostoglotov finds himself thrown once again into the gruelling mechanics of a state still haunted by Stalinism.

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. Withdrawn from publication in Russia in 1964, it became, along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work that awoke the conscience of the world.

  • Published: 31 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448114467
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 576

About the author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born at Kislovodsk in 1918. After graduating at Rostov University in mathematics—he took a correspondence course in literature simultaneously—he was called up for the army. He served continuously at the front as a gunner and artillery officer, was twice decorated, commanded his battery, and reached the rank of captain. In early 1945 he was arrested in an East Prussian village and charged with making derogatory remarks about Stalin. For the next eight years he was in labor camps, at first in 'general' camps along with common criminals in the Arctic and later in Beria's 'special' camps for long-term prisoners. The particular camp described in his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was in the region of Karaganda in northern Kazakhstan. Released in 1953, on Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn had to remain in exile for three years although his wife was allowed to join him, before returning to Russia. He settled near Ryazan and taught in a secondary school. In 1961 he submitted his novel, One Day ..., to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the poet and editor of Novy Mir (New World), a literary journal; it was published, on the final decision of Khrushchev himself, in the November 1962 edition of Novy Mir, which sold out immediately.

Three further stories by him were published during 1963 and a fourth in 1966. In 1968 Solzhenitsyn came under attack from the Russian Literary Gazette, which alleged that since 1967 his aim in life had been to oppose the basic principles of Soviet literature, and accused him of being content with the role given him by ideological enemies of Russia. He was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union in 1969 and in 1974, after the publication in Europe of his book The Gulag Archipelago, he was arrested by the authorities and deported. August 1914, Cancer Ward, The Love-girl and the Innocent (a play), Matryona's House and Other Stories, Candle in the Wind (a play) and Lenin in Zurich are all published by Penguin. The Red Wheel series—of which August 1914 is the initial volume—is his most recent work. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Praise for Cancer Ward

Perhaps the most famous work of fiction dealing directly with the disease

Guardian

And what does Solzhenitsyn say about cancer? How does he reach me, in Australia, with his Russian book? He shows me something valuable that I discovered during my own medical treatment. The people who are involved in cancer -- the sufferer, the doctors, the nurses, the orderlies -- are often occupied less with the cancer than with each other. There are small societies of patients and medical workers in a hospital ward, and in those societies people share what they have: their love and resentment, their stories and observations.

Brenda Walker, The Australian

Solzhenitsyn was a great writer as the result of the collision of a particular personality and an awesome subject matter

Henry Porter, Observer

Solzhenitsyn is a man of genius…it is a privilege to be Solzhenitsyn’s contemporary

Observer

There has been no such analysis of the corrupting power of the police state in Soviet literature

Listener

He is one of the towering figures of the age, as writer, as moralist, as hero

Edward Cranshaw
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