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Title: Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Nicholas Bethell, David Burg ISBN: 0374511993 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: November, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 Amazon Price(USD): $12.60 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.80952
Rating: 5
Summary: "A Real Live Place"
Comment: Those were the words that Dorothy used to describe Oz after waking up in the bosom of her family. The same intense feeling came over me while reading this book, a task that spanned several years, as I often put it aside for other things, always returning, drawn by the power of the author's prose in opening his world to us. The realness of Solzhenitsyn's worlds makes him perhaps the most accessible Russian novelist. As he described the village where Kostoglotov, the protagonist, lived, or in recounting how Ruasov, the villian/fellow victim ruined lives while justifying his actions, a vivid portrait fills the reader's imagination.
The human struggle to find hope and beauty in the most tragic of settings is what this novel evokes so well. Soviet medicine, cancer, a Zek fresh from the Gulag, and in a twilight turned dawn, Solzhenitsyn finds for his semi-autobiographical protagonist happiness, not only in winning victories against a malignant tumor, but in thoughts of perhaps one more summer to live, with nights sleeping under the stars, of three beech trees that stand like ancient guardians of an otherwise empty steppe horizon, a dog that shared his life there, and of a young nurse and spinster doctor, both of whom he hoped at times to love.
The picture one often got (accurately) of the Soviet Union was of greyness, gloom, uniform drabnes, and of a totalitarian police state. This book serves to remind the reader that, despite such circumstances, even desparately sick human being might still seek, and find, happiness in his own, private world. Along with that, Solzhenitsyn never lets us forget the utter corruption of the Soviet state, often in the person of Ruasov, an ailing bureaucrat who has managed to turn personnel management into an exquisite art form, as an instrument of psychological torture, slowly administered.
Of all Solzehenitsyn's works, this is my favorite. The people one encounters are vividly real, and the ending isn't what one would think (or hope), but is fitting, nonetheless.
-Lloyd A. Conway
Rating: 5
Summary: This is a deeply moving work, one of Solzenhitsyn's best.
Comment: Having read a good bit of Solzhenitsyn's books, I can safely say that this is the pinnacle of his work. It simultaneously examines how people cope with the loss of freedom (to the Soviet state and the cancer ward), with the death that surrounds them, and with their own mortality. Through the whole work, too, through death and triumph over disease, runs Solzhenitsyn's recurring theme of the survival and growth of the human spirit under terrible conditions, seen as the main character and those around him realize former errors and deficiencies of character and seek to redeem themselves by doing good for others. I would highly recommend this book to all readers of Solzhenitsyn and, really, anyone.
Rating: 5
Summary: Where do loyalties lie in the face of death?
Comment: At first Cancer Ward exposes the dull horror of succombing to the terminal illness -- the x-ray therapy, the injections, the pain. These treatments seems particularly archaic by today's standards, and help to intensify the despair. But long before the middle of the book, the characters - a group of a dozen or so men in the ward - begin to drive the narrative. They argue party affiliations and politics with a false bravado, trying to believe these things matter, that they'll leave the Ward alive. But it is Kostoglotov (who may have been an inspiration for Kesey's Randall McMurphy, from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) who becomes the life of the novel. A prisoner of the State and a desperately ill man, he nonetheless continues to live fully in the Ward, persuing nurses, ruminating on the nature of illness and exile, and daring to hope. The reader dares to hope, too, as Kostoglotov shows flickering indications of health. A fabulously engaging book - and, inthe bargain, one of the only pieces of fiction that will make you consider a healthier lifestyle
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Title: The First Circle by Thomas P. Whitney, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0810115905 Publisher: Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: October, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.05 Amazon Price(USD): $11.24 |
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Title: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Thomas P. Whitney, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0813332893 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: May, 1997 List Price(USD): $25.00 Amazon Price(USD): $17.50 |
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Title: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Tvardovsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko ISBN: 0451527097 Publisher: Signet Classic Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $5.95 Amazon Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: August 1914: The Red Wheel/Knot 1 by H.T. Willetts, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0374519994 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $25.00 Amazon Price(USD): $17.50 |
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Title: November, 1916: Red Wheel, Knot II (Solzhenisyn Aleksandr Isaevich.//Red Wheel (Paper), Vol 2) by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, H. T. Willetts ISBN: 0374527032 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (Pap) Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.00 Amazon Price(USD): $11.90 |
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