Word: solzhenitsyn
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...CANCER WARD by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Translated by Rebecca Frank. 616 pages. Dial...
Barely a month after the launching of The First Circle (TIME cover, Sept. 27), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward has been published in an English translation. As a special kind of literary import, it stands partially obscured by the excess political baggage that has accompanied it. The kinds of labels inevitably suggested by the advance publicity are gross and distracting: savage expose of Stalinism; revealing political microcosm; old cold-war propaganda. The reader is thus challenged to slip past the luggage and the labels into the heart of the book...
Flashbacks. It isn't easy. For one thing, some of the labels are at least partly true. Cancer makes for strange ward-fellows. The inmates of Solzhenitsyn's ward include men and women from the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union -peasants, ex-prisoners, exiles, bureaucrats, students. When confronted with death, they express jagged-and politically damning-insights into the everyday enormities of life as it had been under Joseph Stalin. Perhaps most shocking are the flashbacks of a powerful party functionary, now suffering from cancer of the throat, who recalls denouncing a friend to the secret police...
...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...
...First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (4) 10. True Grit, Portis...