A largely autobiographical account of a group of people who pass through the cancer wing of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, it is a vivid portrait of individuals in isolation whose collective concern is disease. Through stories of patients and doctors, political prisoners and bureaucrats, the young and the old, it probes the fears and the hopes of an entire cross-section of Soviet society. Cancer ward has been seen as a metaphor for the malignancy afflicting the Russian nation, but the moral and ethical questions it raises-about love and conscience, life and death, spiritual sorrows and triumphs-rise above their immediate political context to assure universal significance. This is the complete unexpurgated edition translated by Nicholas Betthell and David Burg. It includes Solzhenitsyn's world-famous letters to the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers and the Writers' Union, a transcript of the proceedings of the session of the Soviet Writers' Secretariat, and an afterword by Vladimir Petrov. During February and March of 1955, several men pass through the men's cancer ward in a Soviet hospital.