"The Hospital of Transfiguration" marks the beginning of Lem's writing. It is a different novel – contemporary, even a „war novel”. Yet the author managed – within the confinement of a psychiatric hospital, separated from the outside world – 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. Contrary to what might seem in "Hospital of Transfiguration" lie the roots of the most important of Lem's science fiction works.