20th Century Cancer Ward - Softcover

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141180560 ISBN 13: 9780141180564

Publisher: Penguin Classic, 1998

Synopsis

Set in the male cancer ward of a hospital, this book is an examination of men in extreme situations facing basic moral choices. It is also a metaphorical exposition of the situation in the Soviet Union, and was instrumental in Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

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.

About the Author:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In February 1945, while he was captain of a reconnaissance battery of the Soviet Army, he was arrested and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp and permanent internal exile, which was cut short by Khrushchev's reforms, allowing him to return from Kazakhstan to Central Russia in 1956. Although permitted to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962--which remained his only full-length work to have appeared in his homeland until 1990--Solzhenitsyn was by 1969 expelled from the Writers' Union. The publication in the West of his other novels and, in particular, of The Gulag Archipelago, brought retaliation from the authorities. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and forcibly flown to Frankfurt. Solzhenitsyn and his wife and children moved to the United States in 1976. In September 1991, the Soviet government dismissed treason charges against him; Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. He died in Moscow in 2008.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classic
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0141180560
• ISBN 13: 9780141180564
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576