Cancer Ward

Alexander Solzhenitsyn - dissident, exile, Nobel laureate and chronicler of the Gulag - needs no introduction. His denunciations of Soviet inhumanity were always best when grounded in personal detail and individual life-stories, and Cancer Ward is probably the best example of this. Oleg Kostoglotov's exile and illness, and his stay in a hospital in remote Central Asia, are based on the author's own experiences in the mid-fifties. From the restricted environment of a hospital ward and an intensely personal portrait of disease, Solzhenitsyn spins a subtle, profound and intensely moving portrait of a pathological society and the suffering humanity that inhabits it.