Those who have avoided reading the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn for fear his novels are too dense, would do well to pick up Cancer Ward. Although it is a bleak tale of just a few months in a Soviet cancer ward, it is truly an engrossing page-turner.
Solzhenitsyn creates a compelling cast of characters, starting with Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a member of the Communist Party and government worker who is admitted to the ward with a large tumor on his neck. Rusanov believes himself to be superior to his fellow wardmates who are primarily blue collar, or very young.
We are introduced to the very sympathetic ward-mates chapter by chapter, learning each of their stories, what brought them to the ward as well as their dreams for the future when they are finally cured.
Solzhenitsyn integrates politics into this equation, with heavy doses of irony and sarcasm. Through the strained relationships between the men, doctors, nurses and families, we see the cultural and political forces that were in effect in the post-war Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn puts the relationship between a nurse and her patient so beautifully when he writes "Strange living threads, like a woman's long hair, linked her to this patient and entangled her with him. She was the one who felt pain when the threads were tugged and broken."
Surprisingly, the inmates of the cancer ward manage to retain so much hope, despite all they live through. A simple meal, a good book, a beautiful woman, a spring flower on a tree all these symbols of life are highlighted and glorified. When the patient Oleg Kostoglotov is release from the ward, he goes in search of a flowering apricot tree "The first morning of creation who can act rationally on such a day? Oleg discarded all his plans. Instead he conceive the mad scheme of going to the Old Town immediately, while it was still early morning, to look at a flowering apricot tree." These dreams of life and the future are what keep Cancer Ward from becoming too bleak. A reader can't help but get caught up in the lives of these very human characters.
If you need to be reminded of what gives life meaning, pick up Cancer Ward. You certainly won't regret it.
