"Cancer body" Solzhenitsyn. Autobiographical novel

The author himself preferred to call his book a story. And the fact that Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Corps" is usually called the novel in contemporary literary criticism, speaks only of the conventionality of the boundaries of literary forms. But too many meanings and images were tied in this narrative into a single life knot in order to consider the author's designation of the genre of the work to be correct. This book is one of those that require a return to their pages in an attempt to understand what had slipped out on the first acquaintance. There is no doubt that this work is multidimensional. Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Corps" is a book about life, death and destiny, but with all this it is "easy to read". Household and story series here do not contradict philosophical depth and imaginative expressiveness.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "Cancer Corps". Events and people

In the center of the story are doctors and patients. In a small oncology department, standing apart in the courtyard of the Tashkent city hospital, those who were destined to put the "black label" of cancer disease and those who are trying to help them came together. It's no secret that the author went through everything that he describes in his book. A small two-story cancer corps Solzhenitsyn and to this day is at the same place in the same city. Russian writer portrayed him from nature very recognizable, because this is the real part of his biography. The irony of fate brought in the same ward obvious antagonists, which were equal before the impending death. This is the main character, front-line soldier, former prisoner and exile Oleg Kostoglotov, in which the author himself can easily be guessed.

He is confronted by the petty official Soviet careerist Pavel Rusanov, who reached his position as an ardent service to the system and writing denunciations against those who interfered with him or simply did not like him. Now these people are in the same room. Hope for recovery is very ephemeral for them. Many drugs have been tried and it remains to rely only on the means of traditional medicine, such as the mushroom chaga growing somewhere in Siberia on birches. No less interesting are the fates of other inhabitants of the Chamber, but they recede into the background before the confrontation of the two main characters. Within the cancerous body, the life of all the inhabitants goes between despair and hope. Yes, and the author himself managed to defeat the disease already when it seemed that there was nothing to hope for. He lived a very long and interesting life after leaving the oncology department of the Tashkent hospital.

History of the book

Solzhenitsyn's book "Cancer Corps" was published only in 1990, at the end of perestroika. Attempts to publish it in the Soviet Union were undertaken by the author earlier. Separate chapters were being prepared for publication in the journal Novy Mir in the early 1960s, while Soviet censorship did not discern the conceptual artistic design of the book. "Cancer corps" Solzhenitsyn - is not just an oncological department of the hospital, it is something much bigger and ominous. Soviet people had to read this work in Samizdat, but it was possible to suffer a lot from reading it.