HOSPITAL OF THE TRANSFIGURATION

"Although Stanislaw Lem’s first book “Hospital of the Transfiguration” was written in 1948, communist censorship delayed its publication by seven years.
Within the confinement of a psychiatric hospital the author managed to stage a drama of one man strangely torn between his mind and body, desperately seeking meaning of life and trying to save his ethical instinct in the face of the new European nihilism attacking both from the outside and from the inside – in the form of a disease of the soul. In this youthful novel lie the roots of the most important of Lem's science fiction works".