Cancer Ward - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

It had been a long time since I last read Cancer Ward, and my memory of it was impressionistic, a few images and vignettes to brief to be properly called scenes. It is the sort of book where the plot is difficult to hold in your memory because there’s so little of it. There isn’t much of a narrative arc and no overt conflict. The story, such as it is, merely follows the lives of several patients undergoing treatment for cancer at a clinic in Soviet Uzbekistan.

While an ensemble piece, Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov sticks out as the main character. A former soldier undergoing permanent exile as part of the Stalinist purge, Kostoglotov is a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself. His reckoning with his disease, his status in life, and his feelings for two nurses form the closest thing to a narrative thread the novel offers. There are other characters as well, the most notable in my opinion being Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a mid-tier Communist official who adheres rigidly to the party line, and denounced a roommate in order to acquire his half of a shared apartment. Rusanov serves as a foil to Kostoglotov, as the two have diametrically opposed views on the Soviet Union. Rusanov demonstrates the mental contortions the good Soviet citizen must undertake to thrive in that culture without succumbing to guilt or despair, while Kostloglotov’s honesty makes it impossible to function under communism’s yoke.

While light on action, cancer Ward demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s gift for observing fine details of human behaviour, and characterizing people through small gestures. His work is an indictment of communism that showcases power through its plainspokenness. There is no climax or denouement, merely a continuation of existence. Like the cancer the characters suffer, there is remission but no cure.

Petersburg - Andrei Bely

I continue my Russian kick with Andrei Bely’s seminal symbolist novel Petersburg. The book’s history is interesting, in that it had two different publications straddling the Russian Revolution. First released in 1913, it received little notice. It was reissued in 1922 with significant cuts, particularly around anything seen as critical to the revolutionary movement. The first version is widely considered superior, and is the basis of the translation I read.

The story is fairly simple: Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukov, son of prominent bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich, is recruited by radicals to assassinate his father with a bomb stored in a sardine tin. There are other components, like the moral quandary of his contact among the radicals, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, who faces his own pressure form their leader Lippanchenko; the unhappy marriage of Sofya Petrovna Likhutina and her husband Sergei, the former of whom Nikolai pines for; and Nikolai’s unusual tendency to dress up in a red domino costume and make a fool of himself around Petersburg.

But the core of the story is almost besides the point. Much more focus rests on the tone and language of the book, which translators Robert Maguire and John Malmstad take plains to situate in a context comprehensible to English readers yet faithful to the original Russian, and especially on details of place. The main character of Petersburg is ultimately Petersburg itself, manifest at one point by the living Bronze Horsemen, a symbol drawn from the Pushkin poem of the same name quoted regularly throughout.

As a Symbolist work, Petersburg has moments of impenetrability, but there is a playfulness and sardonic wit that you can appreciate even if some of the details escape you. I would not be surprised to learn that Salman Rushdie read and admired this book, as it feels aligned with his work in tenor if not in form. Ulysses by Joyce is also a good comparison (the only book, incidentally, that Nabokov ranked higher than Petersburg in his personal list of the great 20th century masterpieces of literature).

This is not an easy read, but it deserves its place in the canon.

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories - Leo Tolstoy

It’s been a long time since I read much Tolstoy. Apart from rereading Anna Karenina about ten years ago, I haven’t picked up his work since leaving university. I was always more attracted to the darker psychology of Dostoevsky and the proto-surrealism of Gogol. However, as I get older, I’ve come to appreciate Tolstoy more, and it was nice to read a collection that mixed stories I’d encountered before with ones I read for the first time.

This particular collection contains four stories, which I’d classify as novellas or short novels with the exception of Master and Man, which I suppose you would call a short story (such descriptions are more about pacing and tone than actual word count anyway). In addition to its differing length, Master and Man is also the oddball of the four in terms of its subject matter, as the three other stories all deal in some way with unhappy marriages (something of a recurring theme for Tolstoy, who had a famously unhappy marriage of his own).

Of these, Family Happiness explores the theme most overtly, dealing as it does with a young woman who marries and older man only to have her expectations gradually wither. Interestingly, the book is written from the woman’s perspective and is very much on her side. Her husband is not made out as a villain—Tolstoy’s characters are too psychologically complex for such easy characterization—but sympathies lie more with her as the younger, more naïve party who believed an impossible dream and watched it buckle under the weight of reality.

The Death of Ivan Ilych is the best story of the four, and though unhappy marriage is a theme, the focus is ultimately on Ivan’s growing sense of mortality, and his fear not just of dying, but of dying after having lived his life so pointlessly. Praskovya, his wife, is not entirely sympathetic, but there was a humanity in her flaws that felt like a real person rather than a caricature. When her husband falls ill, she treats as either an uncooperative patient or a deliberate nuisance, by turns discounting his pain and chastising him for not doing more to treat it. Her lack of sympathy is harsh, but feels real, reflecting the weight illness puts on the caregiver as well as the sick.

The Kreutzer Sonata is the most Dostoevskyian of the four. It is written as the extended confession-cum-manifesto of a bitter and cynical man who killed his wife after believing her unfaithful (all we know for sure is that she was sitting at a table with another man; whether more was going on I’m not sure). The killer is wistful but unrepentant, seeing his act as necessary but blaming himself for causing it—not by being the murderer, but by “defiling” his wife through marriage and intercourse. He’s a weird dude.

Master and Man is the most tender story, and significantly the only one where a marriage doesn’t feature prominently. The relationship is instead (as the title implies) between a lord and his servant. Impious and greedy, the wealthy landowner Vasili Andreyevich Brekhunov travels through a snowstorm in an effort to beat his competitors to a land deal he believes will be very profitable. On his wife’s assistance, he brings the peasant Nikita with him. Nikita knows he is underpaid by his master but lacks other options. Despite feeling forced to work for him, Nikita is loyal to Vasili and does his best to serve him well. When their sledge gets trapped in the snow and Nikita begins freezing to death, Vasili shows selflessness in covering him with his body. IN lesser hands the story would feel hackneyed, but Tolstoy gives a rich reading of the inner lives of both men, ultimately justifying the action.

Overall, a solid collection of Tolstoy’s work.