Ward 7

Collins and Harvill Press,1966

An autobiographical novel describing one episode in the extraordinary career of Valeroy Tarsis, whose arrival in the UK caused a world-wide sensation. The title Ward 7 is an allusion to the story by Chekhov, Ward 6. The inmates of Chekhov's provincial asylum, where mad or sane or driven to the verge of madness by the brutishness of life in their backward little town, received no treatment; regarded as a public nuisance, they were merely taken out of circulation and incarcerated in conditions of the utmost squalor. 80 years later in Moscow, conditions in Ward 7 are outwardly more civilized, but, as an institution, it is still more evil for it is deliberately used as a prison for sane but troublesome citizens. The author writes from his own experience of such an institution...