page_title: Cancer Ward
section_title: Publishing history
hierarchical_section_title: Cancer Ward / Publishing history
caption_attribution_description: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
context_page_description: Cancer Ward is a semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Completed in 1966, the novel was distributed in Russia that year in samizdat, and banned there the following year. In 1968, several European publishers published it in Russian, and in April 1968 excerpts in English appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK without Solzhenitsyn's permission. An unauthorized English translation was published that year, first by The Bodley Head in the UK, then by Dial Press in the US.
  Cancer Ward tells the story of a small group of patients in Ward 13, the cancer ward of a hospital in Soviet Central Asia in 1955, two years after Joseph Stalin's death. A range of characters are depicted, including those who benefited from Stalinism, resisted or acquiesced. Like Solzhenitsyn, the main character, the Russian Oleg Kostoglotov, spent time in a labour camp as a "counter-revolutionary" before being exiled to Central Asia under Article 58.
  The story explores the moral responsibility of those implicated in Stalin's Great Purge, when millions were killed, sent to camps or exiled.
context_section_description: Solzhenitsyn finished Cancer Ward in mid-1966, and by June that year had sent the manuscript to the Russian literary magazine Novy Mir. The editor, Tvardosky, equivocated and began to request cuts, so Solzhenitsyn arranged that the novel be distributed as samizdat, then that it be discussed at a meeting in Moscow of the Central Writers' Club on 17 November 1966. Joseph Pearce writes that attendance was higher than usual. The club passed a resolution that it would assist Solzhenitsyn in getting Cancer Ward published.
  Solzhenitsyn gave an unauthorized interview to a Japanese journalist that month about The First Circle, another novel of his that the Soviet authorities had blocked, and read out loud from Cancer Ward to 600 people at the Kurchatov Institute of Physics. In 1968 a Russian edition was published in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, and in April that year unauthorized excerpts appeared in English in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK. An unauthorized English translation was published in 1968, first by The Bodley Head in the UK, then by Dial Press in the US. The following year Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Russian Writers' Union.
caption: Farrar, Straus and Giroux's 1969 edition
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