Cancer Ward
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
A towering work of Soviet-era literary fiction, Cancer Ward chronicles the lives of patients confined to a cancer ward in a Central Asian hospital during the mid-1950s, using their shared suffering as a profound metaphor for the diseased state of the Soviet Union under Stalinism. At the center of the narrative stands Oleg Kostoglotov, a former prisoner of the Gulag whose fierce, unbroken spirit clashes with the rigid ideological conformity embodied by fellow patient Pavel Rusanov, a loyal party bureaucrat. Solzhenitsyn masterfully illustrates how illness strips away rank, privilege, and pretense, forcing each character to confront questions of mortality, freedom, and moral responsibility with unflinching honesty. The novel's tone is at once deeply humane and searingly critical, balancing intimate personal anguish against a sweeping indictment of totalitarian society. Written in the late 1960s and initially circulated as samizdat before being published abroad, Cancer Ward stands as one of the most courageous and enduring works of twentieth-century world literature.
Author: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Format: Paperback
Published: 1972, Penguin Books
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
A towering work of Soviet-era literary fiction, Cancer Ward chronicles the lives of patients confined to a cancer ward in a Central Asian hospital during the mid-1950s, using their shared suffering as a profound metaphor for the diseased state of the Soviet Union under Stalinism. At the center of the narrative stands Oleg Kostoglotov, a former prisoner of the Gulag whose fierce, unbroken spirit clashes with the rigid ideological conformity embodied by fellow patient Pavel Rusanov, a loyal party bureaucrat. Solzhenitsyn masterfully illustrates how illness strips away rank, privilege, and pretense, forcing each character to confront questions of mortality, freedom, and moral responsibility with unflinching honesty. The novel's tone is at once deeply humane and searingly critical, balancing intimate personal anguish against a sweeping indictment of totalitarian society. Written in the late 1960s and initially circulated as samizdat before being published abroad, Cancer Ward stands as one of the most courageous and enduring works of twentieth-century world literature.