Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Cancer Ward

Solzhenitsyn was always to be considered the great moralist of the Stalinist regime. Sent to a gulag for criticizing Stalin in a letter, he suffered first-hand the degredations and cruelties of Soviet rule. Awarded the Nobel Prize, exiled from Russia, only to eventually return, Solzhenitsyn’s life and works are intricately bound up with the fortunes of modern Russian history. Perhaps his most emblematic work is the short and marvellous One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicting daily life in a Soviet labour camp, but it is in Cancer Ward (1967; banned the following year in the Soviet Union) where the scope of his ideas first found a substantial home. Primarily both allegorical and semi-autobiographical, Cancer Ward is set just a couple of years after the death of Stalin, and is set in an Uzbek hospital ward. It tells of the fortunes of a group of cancer patients; their illnesses, their histories, their hopes for recovery, their relationships and their treatment under Stalin.

We are first introduced to Pavel Nicolayevich Rusanov, a snivelling Party man who wears thin-rimmed spectacles and has swallowed the callous collectivized propaganda of the state. He sits in pompous judgement over his fellow cancer sufferers, most notably Oleg Kostoglotov (seemingly based to some extent on Solzhenitsyn himself), an embittered yet intellectually lively critic of the regime, who attempts to form relationships with two of the female nurses on the ward, Vera Gangart and the young nurse Zoya. Through these characters and others, Solzhenitsyn explores the impact of Stalinist rule, both on the individual and on society as a whole. The idea of the “cancerous” Soviet state with its “tumours” of labour camps is central to the novel’s themes; just as Kostoglotov, discharged from the ward towards the end of the book, realises that his life cannot ever be quite the same; so, in the zoo, gazing at the caged animals, he comes to understand that Russian life, too, cannot go “back to normal” following the horrors they have witnessed. Through the character of Rusanov Solzhenitsyn explores the human and intellectual fallacies of ideology; subsuming all thought, all feeling and all reason under the cold metal sheet of official state policy, a trick of despots and totalitarians everywhere, which allows human life to become cheap, which ultimately permits the most horrific crimes and destroys empathy. It is a sense of individual liberty which Solzhenitsyn seems to champion; whilst not any kind of cheerleader for Western liberal capitalism, he uses a barbed wire to scar the face of Stalinist propaganda, revealing the wounds beneath.

Also, of course, the book functions as an examination of the state of post-Stalinist healthcare and the suffering of those with cancer, both male and female (although the novel focuses mainly on the men’s ward, one touching scene in particular involving a vibrant young woman about to have her breast removed will stay with me). Solzhenitsyn depicts the realities of the patients: their fears, paranoia, obsessions and denials, as well as the doctors and nurses: the paucity of resources they have to work with, the overstretched system, and even a discourse on the relative merits of public and private healthcare through the private doctor whom Vera goes to see. Cancer Ward is sometimes a difficult book; easy to admire, for sure, but not easy to love. Discussing the artistry of prose in translation is always a tricky business, but Solzhenitsyn has a clear, plain and somehow sneakily profound manner of writing which gets under the skin; despite this, the book, clocking in at 570 pages in my edition, often feels longer than it is and can become turgid in places. There is little amusement here, and although there is a curious sense of life-affirming freedom embodied in Kostoglotov, it remains – as Solzhenitsyn’s legacy bequeaths its own Soviet X-ray to us – bristlingly ambivalent.

This autumn I learned from experience that a man can cross the threshold of death even when his body is still not dead. Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests, while you yourself have gone through the whole psychological preparation for death – and lived through death itself. Everything around you, you see as if from the grave. And although you’ve never counted yourself a Christian, indeed the very opposite sometimes, all of a sudden you find you’ve forgiven all those who trespassed against you and bear no ill-will towards those who persecuted you. You’re simply indifferent to everyone and everything. There’s nothing you’d put yourself out to change, you regret nothing. I’d even say it was a state of equilibrium, as natural as that of the trees and the stones. Now I have been taken out of it, but I’m not sure whether I should be pleased or not. It means the return of all my passions, the bad as well as the good.

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