Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. Autobiographical novel

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The author himself preferred to call his book a story. And the fact that in modern literary criticism Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward" is most often called a novel speaks only of the conventionality of the boundaries of literary forms. But too many meanings and images turned out to be tied in this narration into a single vital knot to consider the author's designation of the work's genre as correct. This book is one of those that require a return to its pages in an attempt to understand what slipped away at the first acquaintance. There is no doubt about the multidimensionality of this work. Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward" is a book about life, death and fate, but with all this, it is, as they say, "easy to read." Everyday life and plot sequences here do not contradict the philosophical depth and figurative expressiveness.

AlexanderSolzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward. Events and people

The story is about doctors and patients. In a small oncology department, standing apart in the yard of the Tashkent city hospital, those who have been black-marked with cancer and those who are trying to help them have come together. It's no secret that the author himself went through everything that he describes in his book. The small two-story cancer building of Solzhenitsyn still stands in the same place in the same city. The Russian writer portrayed him from nature in a very recognizable way, because this is a real part of his biography. The irony of fate brought together obvious antagonists in one chamber, who turned out to be equal before impending death. This is the main character, a front-line soldier, a former prisoner and exile Oleg Kostoglotov, in whom the author himself is easily guessed.

He is opposed by the petty bureaucratic Soviet careerist Pavel Rusanov, who reached his position by devoutly serving the system and writing denunciations against those who interfered with him or simply did not like him. Now these people are in the same room. Hopes for recovery are very ephemeral for them. Many medicines have been tried and it remains only to hope for traditional medicine, such as the chaga mushroom growing somewhere in Siberia on birch trees. No less interesting are the fates of other inhabitants of the chamber, but they recede into the background before the confrontation between the two main characters. Within the cancer corps, the life of all the inhabitants passes between despair and hope. And the author himself managed to defeat the disease already whenthere seemed to be no more hope. He lived a very long and interesting life after leaving the oncology department of the Tashkent hospital.

History of the book

Solzhenitsyn's book "Cancer Ward" was published only in 1990, at the end of perestroika. Attempts to publish it in the Soviet Union were made earlier by the author. Separate chapters were being prepared for publication in the Novy Mir magazine in the early 1960s, until Soviet censorship saw through the conceptual artistic conception of the book. Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward is not just a hospital oncology department, it is something much bigger and more sinister. Soviet people had to read this work in samizdat, but just reading it could have suffered greatly.