Cancer Ward

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1968 CE · Novel · Russian · Contemporary

In a Tashkent hospital ward in 1955 an exiled ex-prisoner shares a room with a party official who built a career on denunciations, and the two argue about what a life is worth while waiting on the same X-rays. One of them picks up a Tolstoy story, What Men Live By, and cannot get past the title. Rejected by Novy Mir once the thaw closed, it reached the West in samizdat two years before the Nobel.

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Lineage

• alludes to ↑ What Men Live By
  Leo Tolstoy · 1885 CE · Short Story

Attributes

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