Le Pavillon des cancéreux

'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 in the mid-1950s from concentration camp to cancer ward and later recovered. The British publication of Cancer Ward in 1968 confirmed him as Russia's greatest living novelist although it has never been openly published in the Soviet Union.