Book description
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Withdrawn from publication in Russia in 1964, it became, along with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. As Robert Service wrote
of its appeal in the Independent
, 'In waging his struggle against Soviet communism, Solzhenitsyn the
novelist preferred the rapier to the cudgel'. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in physics
and mathematics from Rostov University and studied literature by
correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as
an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however,
after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was
arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps,
followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and
settled down to teaching and writing. The publication of One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich
in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his
novels Cancer Ward
and The First Circle
. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his
citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He
settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel
. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was
restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia.
