Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A profound voice from the past, but still fresh and relevant as it was when written. Autobiographical to a certain extent, it is an indictment of communism or a repressive police state and the impotency of medicine in front of inexorable diseases.
Some memorable passages

What name can one give it? Frustration? Depression? When melancholy set in, a kind of invisible but thick and heavy fog invades the heart, envelops the body, constricting its very core. All we feel is this constriction, this haze around us. We don’t even understand at first what it is that grips us.
The tumour itself proclaimed the accuracy of her touch, for it had felt something too. Only a patient can judge whether the doctor understands a tumour correctly with his fingers. Dontsova had felt out his tumour so well that she didn’t really need an X-ray photograph.
The Rusanovs loved the People, their great People. They served the People and were ready to give their lives for the People…But as the years went by they found themselves less and less able to tolerate actual human beings, those obstinate creatures who were always resistant, refusing to do what they were told and, besides, demanding something for themselves.
Man has teeth which he gnashes, grits and grinds. But look at the plants – they have no teeth, and they grow and die peacefully.
Vadim had discovered an important and at first glance paradoxical point: a man of talent can understand and accept death more easily than a man with none – yet the former had more to lose. A man with no talent craves for long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool, if offered eternity, would not know what to do with it.
After all, the value of the human race lay not in its towering quantity, but in its maturing quality.
‘Why does it have to be so unjust? Why should I, an oncologist, be struck down by an oncological disease, when I know every single one of them, when I can imagine all the attendant effects, consequences and complications?’ ‘There is no injustice there, on the contrary, it is justice in the highest degree. It is the truest of all tests for a doctor to suffer from the disease he specializes in.’
A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles?

It also gives a glimpse of Russia’s romance with Hindi films as one of the characters sing “आवारा हूँ...” from the film “The Tramp” (आवारा).

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