The Russian Nobelist's semiautobiographical novel set in a Soviet cancer ward shortly after Stalin's death
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.
"Cancer Ward" examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. We see them under normal circumstances and then reexamined at the eleventh hour of illness. Together they represent a remarkable cross section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes. The experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered.

The Albanian Operation, carried out by British and American secret services from 1949 to 1953, was one of the first Western attempts to subvert a country behind the Iron Curtain. The British liaison officer for the project in Washington was Kim Philby, a Soviet double agent who sabotaged the whole venture. In all, about 300 agents and civilians are thought to have been killed in the disastrous operation. The story was first pieced together by Nicholas Bethell in his 1984 book The Great Betrayal: The Untold Story of Kim Philby's Biggest Coup, based on interviews and conversations with British and American officials and Albanian fighters who infiltrated the Stalinist Albanian regime and escaped alive. The present work presents the interviews throws new light on what actually took place.