Solzhenitsyn gave an unauthorized interview to a Japanese journalist that month about The First Circle, another novel of his the Soviet bureaucrats blocked, and read from Cancer Ward to six hundred people at the Kurchatov Institute of Physics.[1] In 1968, a Russian edition was published in Europe,[2] and in April, unauthorized excerpts appeared in English in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK.[5] An unauthorized English translation was published in 1968, first by The Bodley Head in the UK, then by Dial Press in the US.[4] The following year Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Union of Soviet Writers.[15]