Cancer Ward: A Novel By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The novel tells the story of the fate of the muggle and eternal exile Oleg Kostoglotov, who comes to the Tashkent cancer clinic for treatment in the mid-1950s. It is at a time when Stalin has been dead for two years, Beria has been executed, and when the first timid signs of change are beginning to appear. Party members and exiles, the peoples that Stalin displaced here, and the indigenous population, doctors and patients, meet at the cancer clinic. Their common enemy is illness, death, the end of life… In the proximity of death, all previous certainties, all plans, all privileges fall. And in this world, Solzhenitsyn plays out the stories of his heroes, their loves and hopes. Tumors, sarcomas and methanoblastomas are not only a cruel reality that the heroes of the novel and the doctors face, but also a metaphor for the cancer of lies, hypocrisy, violence and oppression that metastasizes to all levels of Russian society.