Hospital of the Transfiguration

By Stanisław Lem

Book Overview

An early realist novel by Stanislaw Lem, taking place in a Polish psychiatric hospital during World War II.

Taking place within the confines of a psychiatric hospital, Stanislaw Lem's The Hospital of the Transfiguration tells the story of a young doctor working in a Polish asylum during World War II. At first the asylum seems like a bucolic refuge, but a series of sinister encounters and incidents reveal an underlying brutality. The doctor begins to seek relief in the strange conversation of the poet Sekulowski, who is posing as a patient in a bid for safety from the occupying German forces. Meanwhile, Resistance fighters stockpile weapons in the surrounding woods.

A very early work by Lem, The Hospital of the Transfiguration is partly autobiographical, drawing on the author's experiences as a medical student. Written in 1948, it was suppressed by Polish censors and not published until 1955. The censorship of this realist novel is partly what led Lem to focus on science fiction and nonfiction for the rest of his career.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262538490
• ISBN13: 9780262538497
• Release Date: February 2020
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A trip into the surreal

The symbolism and philosophical insight in this book is astounding. The setting is Poland, following the Nazi invasion, but it seems that by starting a new job in an insane asylum, the protagonist escapes the outside world and his "lost motherland" only to join an alien landscape where deranged and yet fascinating people live. You can almost see that even in his first book Lem was already thinking science fiction by reading some of the case histories of the patients. The story almost carries you to another world and until the last chapter you seem to forget the reality of the precarious situation that mental patients faced during Nazi occupation. While I truly enjoyed the story and the dialogues between Stefan and Sekulowski, this book lacks a coherent plot, and suffers from detailed focus into inconsequential details, such as the appearance of a graveyard in the winter and the rays of sunlight shining through the window of a room.

I don't know what the other reviewers read, but...

I loved this book. Lem's partially auto-biographical Transfiguration is set in a WWII era insane asylum in Poland. He tells a compelling story of a time and place when you had to look hard to tell the difference between the doctors and the patients.

one of lem's best

Though some of it is a little fluffy, over all i found this book to be intresting and spellbinding.