pbThe Russian Nobelist's semiautobiographical novel set in a Soviet cancer ward shortly after Stalin's deathb pOne of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's iCancer Wardi is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the cancerous Soviet police state.bribrCancer Wardi, which has been compared to the masterpiece of another Nobel Prize winner, iThe Magic Mountain iby Thomas Mann, 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. While the experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own--Solzhenitsyn became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered--the patients, as a group, represent a remarkable cross section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes, both under normal circumstances and then reexamine