Summary

'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.

'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.