Word: kostoglotov
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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...Most Americans have seen it all already-the devoted old doctor who sees the symptoms of a dread disease but neglects it until TOO LATE because of the press of work; the rich and prideful patient who is cut down to size by the egalitarian properties of pain; even Kostoglotov's brief, touching hanky-panky in a corridor with a pretty nurse named Zoya...
Solzhenitsyn's relentless narrative, moreover, takes place early in Khrushchev's regime, when the Soviet Union was first beginning to admit, and partially mitigate, the crudest of Stalin's repressions. For metaphorically inclined readers, it is justifiable to observe that Oleg Kostoglotov, the author's rough-hewn hero, has his relief from cancer (as Solzhenitsyn himself did) in 1955, precisely when the U.S.S.R. was having its first remission of the disease of mass exile and imprisonment...
...standards, Cancer Ward is not so fine a book as The First Circle. But it adds measurably to Solzhenitsyn's most remarkable creation: the many-sided, often autobiographical composite character who was first seen as Ivan Denisovich, then as Gleb Nerzhin (in The First Circle) and now as Kostoglotov...
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