Cancer Ward Quotes

“The meaning of existence was to preserve untarnished, undisturbed and undistorted the image of eternity which each person is born with - as far as possible.

Like a silver moon in a calm, still pond.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“... I have no knowledge of the world so I read in peace.”
― Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

“Tolstoy's novels are about the planet Earth and Solzhenitsyn's are about Pluto. Tolstoy is writing about a society and Solzhenitsyn is writing about the lack of one... surely there is something wilfully unhistorical about being disappointed that Pierre Bezhukov or Andrey Bolkonsky or Natasha Rostov find no equivalents in Cancer Ward. Characterization in such wealthy detail has become, in Solzhenitsyn's Russia, a thing of the past, and to expect it is like expecting the fur-lined brocades and gold-threaded silks of the Florentine Renaissance to crop up in Goya's visions of the horrors of war. Solzhenitsyn's contemporary novels- I mean the novels set in the Soviet Union- are not really concerned with society. They are concerned with what happens after society has been destroyed.”
― Clive James, Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays

“We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding on to it.”
― Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr.

“When she had left the room, the nurse told Kostoglotov to turn over onto his back again and laid sheets around the first quadrant. Then she brought up heavy mats of rubber impregnated with lead, which she used to cover all the surrounding areas which were not for the moment to receive the direct force of the X-rays. The pressure of the pliable mats, moulded to his body, was pleasantly heavy.
Then the nurse too went out and shut the door. Now she could see him only through a little window in the thick wall. A quiet humming began, the auxiliary lamps lit up, the main tube started to glow.
Through the square of skin that had been left clear on his stomach, through the layers of flesh and organs whose names their owner himself did not know, through the mass of the toad-like tumour, through the stomach and entrails, through the blood that flowed along his arteries and veins, through lymph and cells, through the spine and lesser bones and again through more layers of flesh, vessels and skin on his back, then through the hard wooden board of the couch, through the four-centimetre-thick floor-boards, down, down, until they disappeared into the very stone foundations of the building or into the earth, poured the harsh X-rays, the trembling vectors of electric and magnetic fields, unimaginable to the human mind, or else the more comprehensible quanta that like shells out of guns pounded and riddle everything in their path.
And this barbarous bombardment of heavy quanta, soundless and unnoticed by the assaulted tissues, had after twelve sessions given Kostoglotov back his desire and taste for life, his appetite, even his good spirits. After the second and third bombardments he was free of the pain that had made his existence intolerable, and eager to understand how these penetrating little shells could bomb a tumour without touching the rest of the body.”
― Solzhenitsyn A.