Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Corpus of Problems. Cancer Ward Solzhenitsyn

It is terrible to touch the work of the great genius, Nobel Prize winner, a man about whom so much has been said, but I cannot but write about his story "Cancer Ward" - a work to which he gave, albeit a small, but part of his life, to which he tried to deprive for many years. But he clung to life and endured all the hardships of the concentration camps, all their horror; he brought up in himself his own views on what is happening around, not borrowed from anyone; he expressed these views in his story.

One of its themes is that no matter what a person is, good or bad, educated or, conversely, uneducated; no matter what position he holds, when an almost incurable disease befalls him, he ceases to be a high-ranking official, turns into an ordinary person who just wants to live. Solzhenitsyn described life in a cancer ward, in the most terrible of hospitals, where people are doomed to death. Along with describing the struggle of a person for life, for the desire to simply coexist without pain, without torment, Solzhenitsyn, always and under any circumstances, distinguished by his craving for life, raised many problems. Their range is quite wide: from the meaning of life, the relationship between a man and a woman to the purpose of literature.

Solzhenitsyn brings together in one of the chambers people of different nationalities, professions, committed to different ideas. One of these patients was Oleg Kostoglotov, an exile, a former convict, and the other was Rusanov, the exact opposite of Kostoglotov: a party leader, “a valuable worker, an honored person”, devoted to the party. Having shown the events of the story first through the eyes of Rusanov, and then through the perception of Kostoglotov, Solzhenitsyn made it clear that power would gradually change, that the Rusanovs would cease to exist with their “questionnaire economy”, with their methods of various warnings, and the Kostoglotovs would live, who did not accept such concepts as "remnants of bourgeois consciousness" and "social origin". Solzhenitsyn wrote the story, trying to show different views on life: both from the point of view of Bega, and from the point of view of Asya, Dema, Vadim and many others. In some ways, their views are similar, in some ways they differ. But basically Solzhenitsyn wants to show the wrongness of those who think like Rusanov's daughter, Rusanov himself. They are accustomed to looking for people somewhere necessarily below; think only of yourself, without thinking about others. Kostoglotov - the spokesman for Solzhenitsyn's ideas; through Oleg's disputes with the ward, through his conversations in the camps, he reveals the paradoxical nature of life, or rather, that there was no point in such a life, just as there is no point in the literature that Avieta extols. According to her, sincerity in literature is harmful. “Literature is to entertain us when we are in a bad mood,” says Avieta, not realizing that literature is really a teacher of life. And if you have to write about what should be, then it means that there will never be truth, since no one can say exactly what will happen. And not everyone can see and describe what is, and it is unlikely that Avieta will be able to imagine at least a hundredth of the horror when a woman ceases to be a woman, but becomes a workhorse, who subsequently cannot have children. Zoya reveals to Kostoglotov the whole horror of hormone therapy; and the fact that he is deprived of the right to continue himself horrifies him: “First they deprived me of my own life. Now they are depriving them of the right to ... continue themselves. To whom and why will I now be? .. The worst of freaks! For mercy? .. For alms? .. ”And no matter how much Ephraim, Vadim, Rusanov argue about the meaning of life, no matter how much they talk about him, for everyone he will remain the same - leave someone behind him. Kostoglotov went through everything, and this left its mark on his system of values, on his concept of life.

The fact that Solzhenitsyn spent a long time in the camps also influenced his language and style of writing the story. But the work only benefits from this, since everything that he writes about becomes available to a person, he is, as it were, transferred to a hospital and takes part in everything that happens. But it is unlikely that any of us will be able to fully understand Kostoglotov, who sees a prison everywhere, tries to find and finds a camp approach in everything, even in a zoo. The camp has crippled his life, and he understands that he is unlikely to be able to start his former life, that the road back is closed to him. And millions more of the same lost people are thrown into the vastness of the country, people who, communicating with those who did not touch the camp, understand that there will always be a wall of misunderstanding between them, just as Lyudmila Afanasyevna Kostoglotova did not understand.

We grieve that these people, who were crippled by life, disfigured by the regime, who showed such an irrepressible thirst for life, experienced terrible suffering, are now forced to endure the exclusion of society. They have to give up the life that they have long sought, that they deserve.

There are questions that are embarrassing to ask, and even more so in public. So at some point I asked myself a stupid question: why was Cancer Ward written? The question is doubly stupid. Firstly, because any real work of art is created for one reason: the artist cannot help but create it. And secondly, Solzhenitsyn explained everything in some detail about the Cancer Ward. There is his diary entry in 1968 - "Corpus" had already been written by that time. It is from the so-called R-17 diary, which has not yet been fully published, but fragments of it have been printed. These fragments were used in Vladimir Radzishevsky's comments on Cancer Ward in the 30-volume Solzhenitsyn collection that is being published.

The idea for the story "Two Cancers" arose in 1954. They meant the cancer of a former prisoner and the cancer of a functionary, party worker, prosecutor, with whom Solzhenitsyn did not lie at the same time. He had endured his illness a year earlier and was known to the future author of the Cancer Ward only from the stories of neighbors in this most sad institution. Then he writes that on the day he was discharged, he had a different plot - "The Tale of Love and Illness." And they didn't get together right away. “Only 8-9 years later, already before the appearance of Ivan Denisovich, both plots merged - and the Cancer Ward was born. I started it in January 1963, but it might not have taken place, it suddenly seemed insignificant, on the same line with “For the Good of the Cause” ... ”.

It must be said that Solzhenitsyn seemed to like this story least of all of what he wrote. Fair or not is another story.

“... I hesitated and wrote “DPD”, but “RK” was completely abandoned. Then “The Right Hand” was somehow shared” - a wonderful Tashkent “oncological” story. “It was necessary to create a desperate situation after the removal of the archive, so that in 1966 I would simply forced(Italics for himself Solzhenitsyn this word. — Approx. lecturer) was for tactical reasons, purely tactical: sit behind the "RK", do an open thing, and even (with haste) in two echelons. This means that the first part was given to the editors of Novy Mir, when the second had not yet been completed. Cancer Ward was written so that they could see that I had something - such a purely tactical move. We need to create some visibility. For what? What does Cancer Corps cover? "The Cancer Ward" covers the final stage of work on the "Archi-Pe-Lag".

Work on a summary book about the Soviet camps began long ago. But the shock time for working on The Archipelago, as we know, is from 1965 to 1966 and from 1966 to 1967, when Solzhenitsyn was leaving for Estonia to visit his friends' farm, naturally in the camp. And it was there in the Shelter, as it was later called in the book “A Calf Butted an Oak,” in rather Spartan conditions, “The Archipelago” was written. Here the "Corpus" covers him.

It's like that. Tactics are tactics. But something here, in my opinion, remained unfinished. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn himself did not need to agree on this. Of course, in 1963 Solzhenitsyn began writing and left Korpus. In 1964, he even made a special trip to Tashkent to talk with his doctors, to delve into the matter. But strong work went on at the same time, literally in parallel with the "Archipelago". No, he wrote it at a different time of the year, in other conditions, so to speak, in an open field. But these things went hand in hand.

And there is some very deep meaning in this. We know that Solzhenitsyn did not intend to publish Archipelago right away. Moreover, its publication at the turn of 1973-1974 was forced: it was connected with the KGB seizure of the manuscript, the death of Voronyanskaya This refers to the suicide (according to the official version) of Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, Solzhenitsyn's assistant and typist and secret keeper of part of his manuscripts., with all these terrible circumstances - when he gave the command to print. In principle, he assumed this publication later. Even in the situation of confrontation in the late 1960s - early 1970s with the authorities, and by no means only from the instinct of self-preservation, Solzhenitsyn believed that the turn of this book had not yet come. The blast wave will be too powerful, and God knows what will happen here.

And while breathing this out, building it up, he simultaneously wrote Cancer Ward, a book that made it possible to take the path of reconciliation. Not oblivion of the past, but reconciliation, repentance and human conversation, including not least with the authorities. That is why this initial message was so important. Two cancers. What does this mean? This means that all people are mortal, and according to Tolstoy's story, which is read in the "Cancer Ward" This refers to Tolstoy's 1881 story "What makes people alive.", the inevitable question: how do people live?

The key phrase for the Cancer Ward is what Efrem Podduev recalls, how he did not spare the prisoners. Not because he had any special feelings for them, but because he would be asked if the ditch was not dug up. And I heard: “And you will die, foreman!” Here are the prosecutors, and personnel officers, and supra-party functionaries - you are also not immune from cancer and from diseases that are worse than cancer. Remember, Rusanov exclaims: "What could be worse?" Kostoglotov answers him: "Leprosy." You are not insured against illnesses or death, come to your senses.

Therefore, the Tolstoy component of the subtext and the death of Ivan Il-ich is so important, as well as a direct discussion of the story “What makes people alive”. Solzhenitsyn was always, as they say, fanatically fascinated by the accuracy of a fact. At the same time, the duration of the "Cancer Ward" was postponed for a year. He fell ill in the spring of 1954 - yes, and the action takes place in 1955. Why? Because it was in 1955 that changes began to be felt in the country. The removal of most of the members of the Supreme Court, the resignation of Malenkov, and those cheerful promises of the commandant that sound in the last chapter: soon all this will end, there will be no eternal exile.

The Cancer Ward was written about a time of hope, and let us note that it was written during a difficult, but in some way, time of hope. In hindsight, we are well aware that he drove liberalization into the coffin. But in fact, the situation in 1966, 1965, 1967 was extremely fluctuating. It is not clear what this collective leadership will pre-accept. And here this human message was extraordinarily important. It was a missed chance for the authorities and for society. While social orientation was very important, Solzhenitsyn wanted Korpus to be published in samizdat.

And here it is impossible not to draw two analogies. When the noose completely approached, in the autumn of 1973, everything became clear, and Alexander Isaevich did not know whether he should go west or east or be killed. What is he doing at this very moment? He writes a letter to the leaders of the Soviet Union, saying that you live on this earth, you are Russian people, is there something human in you? It didn't turn out. And I must say that about the same happened many years later with a word addressed not so much to the authorities as to society, with the article “How can we equip Russia”, where those very soft ways, understanding, negotiation, recovery were not seen, not heard. In general, about the same as it happened with the "Cancer Ward" in its time.

The novel Cancer Ward was written in the 60s of the last century. But in those years, it was impossible to publish the work due to censorship, so the novel diverged among readers in samizdat versions, and was also published abroad. It was only in 1990 that it was first published on the pages of Novy Mir in the USSR. This novel, although the author preferred to call the work a story, gave impetus to the Nobel Prize for the writer.

The title of the novel, which the author defended during publication, is symbolic, you understand this immediately, starting to read it. The events take place in the thirteenth building of the hospital in Tashkent. It is this building that contains patients with cancer. And when you get to know the characters, you immediately realize that the author chose the “cancer disease” to comprehend what is happening in society: the cancerous tumor of communist society gave rise to such a terrible monster as the camp system.

With his work, Solzhenitsyn gives a warning, warns against the terrible consequences of this cancerous tumor of society. It must be removed at the root, gradually curing metastases, otherwise it will lead to the complete destruction of society. In a cancerous tumor, the author symbolizes both the communist society as a whole and the camp system that it created. According to the author's words, a country cannot be healthy with such a tumor.

We can call this work a historical narrative, because its pages reflect the historical events of the country, describe the customs and life of Soviet society.

Most of the heroes of the work are closely connected with the world of the camps through which they passed. Completely different people with different views, destinies and characters gathered in the cancer ward. But all of them are united by one disease - cancer. They come out of this disease in different ways - some get better, while others are sent home to die, because they are incurable. Using the example of one hospital ward, Solzhenitsyn depicted the life of an entire state.

While in the hospital, patients, having a lot of free time, spend it in discussions and disputes about life and death, about politics and ideology.

Most of the heroes of the work are connected with the camps. Some served time there, others worked for the camps. Therefore, they have different opinions about the system that gave rise to this horror. But they are all victims of the system and in the face of death are helpless.

Reading the Cancer Ward, we all think about the essence of being and the meaning of life, about good and evil.

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It is terrible to touch the work of the great genius, Nobel Prize winner, a man about whom so much has been said, but I cannot but write about his story "Cancer Ward" - a work to which he gave, albeit a small, but part of his life, to which he tried to deprive for many years. But he clung to life and endured all the hardships of the concentration camps, all their horror; he brought up in himself his own views on what is happening around, not borrowed from anyone; he expressed these views in his story.
One of its themes is that no matter what a person is, good or bad, educated or, conversely, uneducated; no matter what position he holds, when an almost incurable disease befalls him, he ceases to be a high-ranking official, turns into an ordinary person who just wants to live. Solzhenitsyn described life in a cancer ward, in the most terrible of hospitals, where people are doomed to death. Along with describing the struggle of a person for life, for the desire to simply coexist without pain, without torment, Solzhenitsyn, always and under any circumstances, distinguished by his craving for life, raised many problems. Their range is quite wide: from the meaning of life, the relationship between a man and a woman to the purpose of literature.
Solzhenitsyn brings together in one of the chambers people of different nationalities, professions, committed to different ideas. One of these patients was Oleg Kostoglotov, an exile, a former convict, and the other was Rusanov, the complete opposite of Kostoglotov: a party leader, “a valuable worker, an honored person”, devoted to the party. Having shown the events first through the eyes of Rusanov, and then through the perception of Kostoglotov, Solzhenitsyn made it clear that power would gradually change, that the Rusanovs would cease to exist with their “questionnaire economy”, with their methods of various warnings, and the Kostoglotovs would live, who did not accept such concepts as "remnants of bourgeois consciousness" and "social origin". Solzhenitsyn wrote the story, trying to show different views on life: both from the point of view of Bega, and from the point of view of Asya, Dema, Vadim and many others. In some ways, their views are similar, in some ways they differ. But basically Solzhenitsyn wants to show the wrongness of those who think like Rusanov's daughter, Rusanov himself. They are accustomed to looking for people somewhere necessarily below; think only of yourself, without thinking about others. Kostoglotov - the spokesman for Solzhenitsyn's ideas; through Oleg's disputes with the ward, through his conversations in the camps, he reveals the paradoxical nature of life, or rather, that there was no point in such a life, just as there is no point in the literature that Avieta extols. According to her, sincerity in literature is harmful. “Literature is to entertain us when we are in a bad mood,” says Avieta, not realizing that literature is really a teacher of life. And if you have to write about what should be, then it means that there will never be truth, since no one can say exactly what will happen. And not everyone can see and describe what is, and it is unlikely that Avieta will be able to imagine at least a hundredth of the horror when a woman ceases to be a woman, but becomes a workhorse, who subsequently cannot have children. Zoya reveals to Kostoglotov the whole horror of hormone therapy; and the fact that he is deprived of the right to continue himself horrifies him: “First they deprived me of my own life. Now they are depriving them of the right to ... continue themselves. To whom and why will I now be? .. The worst of freaks! For mercy? .. For alms? .. ”And no matter how much Ephraim, Vadim, Rusanov argue about the meaning of life, no matter how much they talk about him, for everyone he will remain the same - leave someone behind him. Kostoglotov went through everything, and this left its mark on his system of values, on his concept of life.
The fact that Solzhenitsyn spent a long time in the camps also influenced his language and style of writing the story. But the work only benefits from this, since everything that he writes about becomes available to a person, he is, as it were, transferred to a hospital and takes part in everything that happens. But it is unlikely that any of us will be able to fully understand Kostoglotov, who sees a prison everywhere, tries to find and finds a camp approach in everything, even in a zoo. The camp has crippled his life, and he understands that he is unlikely to be able to start his former life, that the road back is closed to him. And millions more of the same lost people are thrown into the vastness of the country, people who, communicating with those who did not touch the camp, understand that there will always be a wall of misunderstanding between them, just as Lyudmila Afanasyevna Kostoglotova did not understand.
We grieve that these people, who were crippled by life, disfigured by the regime, who showed such an irrepressible thirst for life, experienced terrible suffering, are now forced to endure the exclusion of society. They have to give up the life that they have long sought, that they deserve.

The writing

In Cancer Ward, using the example of one hospital ward, Solzhenitsyn depicts the life of an entire state. The author manages to convey the socio-psychological situation of the era, its originality on such seemingly small material as the image of the life of several cancer patients who, by the will of fate, found themselves in the same hospital building. All heroes are not just different people with different characters; each of them is a carrier of certain types of consciousness generated by the era of totalitarianism. It is also important that all the characters are extremely sincere in expressing their feelings and defending their beliefs, as they are in the face of death.

Oleg Kostoglotov, a former convict, independently came to the denial of the postulates of the official ideology. Shulubin, a Russian intellectual, a participant in the October Revolution, gave in, outwardly accepting public morality, and doomed himself to a quarter of a century of mental torment. Rusanov appears as the "world leader" of the nomenklatura regime. But, always strictly following the line of the party, he often uses the power given to him for personal purposes, confusing them with public interests. The beliefs of these heroes are already fully formed and are repeatedly tested in the course of discussions. The rest of the heroes are mostly representatives of the passive majority who have accepted official morality, but they are either indifferent to it or defend it not so zealously. The whole work is a kind of dialogue of consciousness, reflecting almost the entire spectrum of life ideas characteristic of the era. The external well-being of the system does not mean that it is devoid of internal contradictions. It is in this dialogue that the author sees the potential for curing the cancer that has affected the entire society.

Born in the same era, the characters of the story make different life choices. True, not all of them realize that the choice has already been made. Efrem Podduev, who lived his life the way he wanted, suddenly understands, turning to Tolstoy's books, all the emptiness of his existence. But this epiphany of the hero is too late. In essence, the problem of choice confronts every person every second, but out of many solutions, only one is right, out of all life's paths, only one is right to the heart. Demka, a teenager at a crossroads in life, realizes the need for a choice. At school, he absorbed the official ideology, but in the ward he felt its ambiguity, having heard the very contradictory, sometimes mutually exclusive statements of his neighbors. The clash of positions of different characters occurs in endless disputes, affecting both everyday and existential problems. Kostoglotov is a fighter, he is tireless, he literally pounces on his opponents, expressing everything that has become sore during the years of forced silence. Oleg easily fends off any objections, since his arguments are self-sufficient, and the thoughts of his opponents are most often inspired by the dominant ideology. Oleg does not accept even a timid attempt at compromise by Rusanov. But Pavel Nikolayevich and his like-minded people are unable to object to Kostoglotov, because they are not ready to defend their convictions themselves. The state has always done this for them.

Rusanov lacks arguments: he is used to realizing his own rightness, relying on the support of the system and personal power, but here everyone is equal in the face of imminent and imminent death and in front of each other. Kostoglotov's advantage in these disputes is also determined by the fact that he speaks from the position of a living person, while Rusanov defends the point of view of a soulless system. Shulubin only occasionally expresses his thoughts, defending the ideas of "moral socialism." It is precisely to the question of the morality of the existing system that all disputes in the chamber ultimately converge. From Shulubin's conversation with Vadim Zatsyrko, a talented young scientist, we learn that, according to Vadim, science is only responsible for the creation of material wealth, and the scientist should not be concerned about the moral aspect. Demka's conversation with Asya reveals the essence of the education system: from childhood, students are taught to think and act like everyone else. The state, with the help of the school, teaches insincerity, instills in schoolchildren distorted ideas about morality and morality. In the mouth of Aviette, the daughter of Rusanov, an aspiring poetess, the author puts official ideas about the tasks of literature: literature should embody the image of a “happy tomorrow”, in which all the hopes of today are realized. Talent and writing skill, of course, can not be compared with the ideological requirement. The main thing for the writer is the absence of "ideological dislocations", so literature becomes a craft that serves the primitive tastes of the masses. The ideology of the system does not imply the creation of moral values, for which Shulubin yearns, betraying his convictions, but not losing faith in them. He understands that a system with a displaced scale of life values ​​is not viable. Rusanov's stubborn self-confidence, Shulubin's deep doubts, Kostoglotov's intransigence - different levels of personality development under totalitarianism. All these positions in life are dictated by the conditions of the system, which thus not only forms an iron support for itself out of people, but also creates conditions for potential self-destruction.

All three heroes are victims of the system, since it deprived Rusanov of the ability to think independently, forced Shulubin to renounce his beliefs, and took away freedom from Kostoglotov. Any system that oppresses a person disfigures the souls of all its subjects, even those who serve it faithfully. 3. Thus, the fate of a person, according to Solzhenitsyn, depends on the choice that the person himself makes. Totalitarianism exists not only thanks to tyrants, but also thanks to the passive and indifferent to the entire majority, the "crowd". Only the choice of true values ​​can lead to victory over this monstrous totalitarian system. And everyone has the opportunity to make such a choice.