Cancer Ward

There has been no such analysis of the corrupting power of the police state in Soviet literature - Stuart Hood in the Listener Solzhenitsyn, like Oleg Kostoglotov, the central character of this novel, went into the mid-1950s from concentration camp to cancer ward and later recovered. The British publication of Cancer Ward in 1968 confirmed his as Russia's greatest living novelist. Cancer Ward was not published openly in the Soviet Union until permission for its serialisation was granted over two decades later, in 1989.