Георгий Иванович Шилин was a Soviet prose writer and participant of the First World War. His first book received positive feedback from Maxim Gorky, and his creative peak came in the 20s-30s of the last century. However, he was forgotten for a long time afterward.
Georgiy Shilin’s most famous novel is «The Lepers». The author delved into studying leprosy — this terrifying mythologized disease that forced him to do so due to personal history: when he visited his hometown for some time, Shilin wanted to visit an old friend but found out that he had fallen ill and been placed in a leper colony. This experience led the writer to spend several days among those afflicted by visiting their «infected courtyard.» Subsequently, Shilin repeatedly visited various leper colonies across different cities within USSR as part of research for his novel; He studied available medical literature on it extensively while consulting with prominent specialists and even participated in conferences held by doctors specializing in treating lepers.
Apart from its solid scientific foundation, the novel stands out because of its vivid portrayal of characters — patients whose social lives were cut off despite continuing physical existence often without hope ever leaving these sanatoriums; doctors who selflessly dedicated themselves to science refusing surrendering before one humanity’s oldest known diseases
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