[In the following review of Hospital of the Transfiguration, Urbanska commends Lem's “acute powers of observation,” but finds shortcomings in the novel's disengaged characters.]

There are certain novels, written early in a career, that are published only after the writer has staked a place on the literary map. Camus’ A Happy Death comes to mind. Often these works demonstrate youthful talent not fully realized, and their interest lies mainly in how they foreshadow subsequent material. Hospital of the Transfiguration—the first novel of Stanislaw Lem, the world-renowned, Polish, science-fiction master, written in 1948 when Lem was 27—is such a book.

Hospital is a bildungsroman in which Stefan—a young doctor and the apparent alter ego of the author, who studied medicine in Krakow—comes of age in Poland during the first year of the Nazi occupation. Awkward, painfully self-conscious and insomnia-prone, Stefan takes a job at a remote insane asylum where he's brutalized by what he witnesses: sadistic nurses and orderlies who plunge patients into scalding baths and ignore hospital policy by issuing secret beatings; a superior who delays operating on a cancerous man and loses him on the operating table; a claustrophobic, self-contained system to which one too quickly becomes inured.

The contorted characters and the strangeness of the place are exacerbated by Poland's impotence under German occupation. Nazis ride roughshod over Polish institutions and individuals, which Stefan experiences firsthand on a visit to his sick father. At the asylum, medical supplies grow short. Rumor has it that the Nazis intend to liquidate the asylums—and worse.

“The consequence of their ideology would be the biological annihilation of our nation,” remarks a friend of Stefan. Nonetheless, staff members bury their heads in the sands of research and the daily routine, minimizing the Nazi threat, making it, as Stefan says, “at most, a distant echo.”

Like a puppy looking for its master, Stefan goes from one man to the next in search of meaning. In Sekulowski, an eccentric poet who's taken up residence in the asylum to escape detection by the Nazis, Stefan finds, if not meaning, at least stimulation.

Sekulowski loves to hear himself talk—and here Lem folds in musings on the state of literature and the wild genetic improbability of each human life. The narcissistic poet even summons young Stefan into the bathroom as he showers, so as not to interrupt his running monologue. “Sekulowski treated him as no more than a sparring partner, regarding his own mind as the measure of all things.”

Stefan—a pliable and surprisingly naive young man, without center, temper or much conviction—seems unaffected by the imbalance in the relationship. And herein lies the trouble in the novel.

In Stefan's encounters with others, they act but he fails to react or reveal himself; Stefan intellectualizes life rather than engaging in it. It is as if Lem the writer faithfully records all he sees—except for his own soul. Philosophy is discussed but feelings are slighted, the net effect of which is to leave the reader feeling disengaged.

At novel's end, the inevitable boom falls—the patients are executed and buried in mass graves by the Nazis, who plan to convert the facility into an SS hospital—and characters step forward and reveal their true natures. The existential poet, we learn, wants desperately to live; another man, begging for acceptance by the new powers that be, trumpets his German heritage; the beauteous, but hitherto inscrutable, female doctor offers herself to Stefan in a move that comes completely without warning.

Despite its shortcomings, Hospital is a showcase for the youthful Lem's acute powers of observation. It shows a budding author who revels in the human condition drinking it in and taking it all down—without realizing his own place in the parade. It succeeds as a novel of perceptions and ruminations, a collection of character sketches that only loosely hang together in one whole literary garment. Perhaps Lem chose wisely in turning his enormous talents toward science fiction.