Cancer Ward (Rakovy Korpus)

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer, publicist, and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature (1970). The story 'Cancer Ward,' presented in this edition, was conceived by Solzhenitsyn in the summer of 1954 in Tashkent, where, after a prison camp, he was undergoing treatment at an oncology clinic. It was written between 1963 and 1967. The decision of the magazine 'Novy Mir' to publish the story was met with a firm ban from the authorities. 'Cancer Ward' was distributed in samizdat, and in 1968 it was published in Russian abroad. It has been translated into virtually all European and several Asian languages. It was first published in its homeland in 1990. The story's heroes are patients in a 'cancer ward' in a Central Asian city in the mid-20th century. Among them are people from all corners of the vast country, from all social strata, including exiles. The struggle with illness. Attempts to understand life and death. The social climate after Stalin's death, when the country seemed to be regaining consciousness after a terrible illness, is depicted in the story's characters, who inhabit a single hospital ward, embody Russia's pain and hope.