Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cancer Ward is Post-Stalin-Pre-Khrushchev USSR from Solzhenitsyn’s eyes. It is quite a fantastic read if you haven’t read The Gulag Archipelago from Solzhenitsyn.

Context: Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov is an ‘personnel’ office and suffering from lymphoma. He is placed in a Cancer Ward for further observation with many other patients from the USSR. Yefrem is one of the patients.

Of course, Pavel Nikolayevich could have cut him short and put him in his place, but somehow he could not summon his usual will power. It was already low, and it had sunk even lower at the words of this bandaged devil. He needed support but instead he was being pushed down into a pit. In a matter of hours he had as good as lost all his personal status, reputation and plans for the future - and had turned into eleven stones of hot, white flesh that did not know what tomorrow would bring.

His face probably revealed his melancholy state, for on one of his subsequent walks Yefrem stopped opposite to him and said quite peaceably “Even if they do let you go home, you’ll be back here pretty quick. The Crab loves the people. Once he’s grabbed you with his pincers, he won’t let you go till you croak”.

Context: Ahmadjan is an Uzbek patient who is prison camp ground.

He (Pavel Nikolayevich) could not sleep. His tumor weighed him down. His whole happy life, so well thought out, so harmonious and useful, was now about to crack. He felt very sorry for himself. One little push would be enough to bring tears to his eyes.

It was Yefrem who did not fail to provide the push. Unrestrained even in the dark he was telling Ahmadjan next to him some idiotic fairy-tale:

Why should man live a hundred years? This is how it happened. Allah gave all the animals fifty years each, and that was enough. But man came last and Allah had only twenty five left.

You mean a twenty-fiver? asked Ahmadjan. (Ahmadjan, an Uzbek, is making a joke to prove how well he speaks Russian)

That’s right. And man started complaining it wasn’t enough. Allah said “it is enough!” and man said “No it isn’t”. So Allah said, “All right go out and ask, maybe someone has some over and will give you some”.

Man went off and met a horse “listen”, he said, “my life’s too short. Give me some of yours”. “All right”, said the horse, “take twenty five years”.

Man went a bit futher and met a dog “Listen dog, let me have some of your life”. “All right, have twenty five years”.

On he went. He met a monkey, and he got twenty five years out of him too. Then went back to Allah, and Allah said “As you wish, it is up to you. The first twenty five years you’ll live like a man. The second twenty five years you’ll work like a horse. The third you’ll yap like a dog. And for the last twenty five years people will laugh at you like they laugh at a monkey”.

Context: Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov suffers from stomach cancer and exiled in a village called Ush Terek on the steppe. Olga is a nurse-student who is one of love interest. Kostoglotov is describing the need to read a medical book about his tumor which is forbidden for patients. He is describing to Zoya that a Korean surgeon gave him 3 months to live.

He was a good man. A human being. I shook his hand. You see, I had to know! I’d tormented myself for six months before that. The last month I hadn’t been able to lie, sit down or stand without it hurting and I was only sleeping a few minutes a day. So I must have done plenty of thinking. 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 of 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 are 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 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.

Context: Yefrem Podduyev who was very healthy and was a construction worker till he found he had cancer.

He’d fallen ill for the first time the year before last - and bang it was this.

Cancer.

‘Cancer’. Now he could blurt it out just like that; but for ages he had been telling himself it was nothing, not worth a damn. While he could bear it, he put off going to the doctor. But once he had gone they showed him round from pillar to post until they sent him to cancer clinic; but the patients there were always told they didn’t have cancer, and Yefrem wasn’t going to figure out what he had. He couldn’t trust the wits he was born with, he believed what he wanted to believe; that he didn’t have cancer, that he’d be all right in the end.

He refused an operation, so they started needle treatment: they pushed needles into his tongue as if he were a sinner in Hell, and kept them there for several days. How Yefrem wanted it to stop there, how he hoped! No. His tongue kept swelling. He could no longer muster that famous will-power of his; he laid his bull-like head down on the white clinic table and gave in.

He no longer had a taste for the free life: he had gone off work and having a good time, off smoking and drinking. His neck was not softening; it was filling out, and it stung and shot pain right into his head. The disease was creeping up his neck almost to his ears.

Then not much more than a month ago he had returned to this same old grey-building walking up between the poplars to the same porch polished by so many thousands of pairs of feet. The surgeons immediately grabbed him like an old friend and put him into the same striped hospital pyjamas, in the same ward near the operating theatre with windows that gave on to the back fence. And there he waited for a second operation on his poor neck which would make three in all. Then Yefrem Podduyev could no longer kid himself, and he didn’t. He knew he had cancer.

Context: Yevgenia Ustinova is a talented surgeon and an avid smoker.

Yevgenia Ustinova had been a surgeon all her life: without surgery she would be nothing. Still, she remembered and understood the words of Tolstoy’s Cossak, Yeroshka, who said about West European doctors, “All they can do it cut. Well, they’re fools. But up in the mountains you get real doctors."

And if tommorow some other kind of therapy were invented - radiation, chemical or herbal, or even soemthing worked by light, color or telepathy, which could save her patients without the knife and would mean that surgery would completely vanish from human practice, Yevgenia Ustinova would not have defended her craft for one day, not because of her convictions but because she had spent all her life, cutting, cutting, all her life had been blood and flesh. It is one of the tiresome but unavoidable facts about humanity that people cannot refresh themselves in the middle of their lives by a sudden, abrupt change of occupation.

However much we laugh at miracles when we are strong, healthy and prosperous, if life becomes so hedged and cramped that only a miracle can save us, then we clutch at this unique, exceptional miracle and - believe in it.

When you are young you haven’t the experience, when you’re old you haven’t the strength.

Context: The Kadmins – Kostoglotov’s exile neighbours and friends, who also spent seven years in the prison camps

This morning he’d received a letter from the Kadims. Among other things Nikolai Ivanovich had answered his question about the origin of the expression ‘soft words will break your bones’. It came from a collection of didactic 15th century Russian Chronicles, a sort of manuscript book. In it there was a story about Kitovras. (Nikolai Ivanovich always knew about things that were old). Kitovras lived in a remote desert. He could only walk in a straight line. King Solomon summoned him and by a trick contrived to bind him with a chain. Then they took him away to break stones. But since Kitovras could only walk in a straight line, when they led him through Jerusalem they had to tear down the houses which happened to be in his way. One of them belonged to a widow. The widow began to weep and implore Kitovras not to break down her poor, pitiful dwelling. Her tears moved him and he gave in. Kitovras began to twist and turn to left and right until he broke a rib. The house remained intact, but Kitovras said ‘Soft words will break your bones, hard words will rouse your anger’.