Customer Reviews (3)

Great literature in here
Reading some of the lukewarm responses to this work from the two reviewers who posted before me, I'm inspired to add my two cents worth.I find what I've read so far in this collection - "Matronya's House", "For the Good of the Cause", "The Easter Procession", "Zakhar-the-Pouch", and "The Right Hand" - to be fantastic short fiction, powerfully felt and heard with the inner ear that Nabokov urges you to use when you read.I left work last week in a good mood, completed "For the Good of the Cause" on the 45-minute train ride home, and was downright bleak as a I walked in the front door.I'm not saying it's good to be down, but a story that can have such an impact that it actually changes your mood has to be tapping into a truly artistic vein.So I'm just going to be a voice here on this forum saying that Solzhenitsyn can really really write, and these stories range from very good to great.

Completists Only
That this book was published in the early 1970s is no accident. It was at this time that Solzhenitsyn was at the height of his influence and virtually any scrap of nonsense he managed to get to a publishing house would be ravenously devoured and shat out in cloth and paper post-haste. That's why you can find a million used copies of the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago but hardly any of the second or the third. It's not to say that Solzhenitsyn is a bad writer- he's very good- but he was beholden entirely to the Western audience that never understood him except in the crudest sense and would buy anything he wrote simply because his name was on it.

It's a shame that this book was published under such shady circumstances and without the prudent editing which would have been involved in a normal release, because some of the material here is quite good. Matronya's house is a charming provincial fable about the necessity of sacrifice, hard work and steely moral discipline to preserving civilization. The Right Hand is simultaneously tiny sliceof Cancer Ward and a bitter rebuke of those who collaborated with the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. For the Good of the Cause is a tale drawn from his days as a teacher and Incident at Keretchkova (I'm positive I misspelled that) Station is a story of wartime Russia and the chaos, confusion, distrust and anger which engulfed it during the most hopeless moments of the German onslaught.

Everything else is either middling or worthless. His maudlin Easter Procession is Solzhenitsyn's stubborn orthodoxy and mystic spirituality at its most unbearably preachy and every single one of the prose poems should have been sliced out and left for his Collected Works. Still, the book is cheap and if you're looking for a more nuanced portrait of Solzhenitsyn the man and less Solzhenitsyn the prisoner it can hardly hurt to pick it up.

One powerful story and a few lesser ones A great writer not always at his best
Solzhenitsyn is one of mankind's greatest writers. His 'Gulag Archipelago' is a most powerful work of witnessing which opened to the world the long dark night of the Soviet prison world. In that work he recorded the story of thousands of witnesses, allowed them to speak in their own voices. In this collection of stories and prose poems Solzhenitsyn is not always at his best. But in one story, the opening autobiographical story he tells of his life in a remote central Asian village where he boarded with a peasant woman Maryousha who in her humility is taken by him to be a kind of saint. His depiction of the poverty cruelty and greed of this world is Chekhovian .
In other stories Solzhenitsyn tells of the corruption of Soviet bureaucracy, and the distance the people seem to be from true religious life.
His love of and search for the true Russia is an implicit theme of the work.
It would have been helpful to have some kind of introduction to the work, some explanation of where the individual pieces stand in relation to Solzhenitsyn's work as a whole.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Happy Russians?!
A memorable line that evokes this play: "A Typically Russian celebration. It started sideways and ended sadly."

Victory Celebrations was a trial to read. The play is very wordy with confusing actions written in and many obscure references that only well learned and informed Russian scholars or students would be able to follow. Full of irony about Russian joy, and sarcastic banter about punishments at the hands of the Party and the Communist system, the play has too much in every way, and consequently no appeal or magnetism.

An interesting footnote is that Victory Celebrations was "composed orally while on gang labour" by Solzhenitsyn. This explains the ironic and sarcastic bombast of the officers, the occasional, seemingly delusional yet lucid speeches about hard hellish "real" life in Stalin's army and country.

Those speeches, which illuminate the horror and doldrums of Communist Russia are the best part of Victory Celebrations. Coming from Solzhenitsyn such descriptions are apt and weighted. But the rest of the play was a bore. I was confused who was who, what was going on, and had less and less interest in finding out.

I would figure this is ideal for Solzhenitsyn fans/students, and Russian theatre afficianados and the like. ... Read more

Product Description
Georg Lukács's most recent work of literary criticism, on the Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, hails the Russian author as a major force in redirecting socialist realism toward the level it once occupied in the 1920s when Soviet writers portrayed the turbulent transition to socialist society.

In the first essay Lukács compares the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to short pieces by "bourgeois" writers Conrad and Hemingway and explains the nature of Solzhenitsyn's criticism of the Stalinist period implied in the situation, characters, and their interaction. He also briefly describes Matriona's House, An Incident at the Kretchetovka Station, and For the Good of the Cause—stories that depict various aspects of life in Stalinist Russia.

In the second, longer section, Lukács greets Solzhenitsyn's novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward, which were published outside Russia, as representing "a new high point in contemporary world literature." These books mark Solzhenitsyn as heir to the best tendencies in postrevolutionary socialist realism and to the literary tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moreover, from the point of view of the development of the novel, Lukacs finds the Russian author to be a successful exponent of innovative methods originating in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

The central problem of contemporary socialist realism is a predominant theme in the book: how to come to critical terms with the legacy of Stalin. The enthusiasm with which Lukács acclaims Solzhenitsyn will not surprise those who have followed his persistent refusal to endorse the so-called socialist realist writers of the Stalinist era. He outlines the aspects of Solzhenitsyn's creative method that allows him to cross the ideological boudaries of the Stalinist tradition, yet he finds a basic pessimism in Solzhenitsyn's work that makes him a "plebeian" rather than a socialist writer.

Of Ivan Denisovich and the future of socialist realist literature, Lukács urges: "If socialist writers were to reflect upon their task, if they were again to feel an artistic responsibiliity towards the great problems of the present, powerful forces could be unleashed leading in the direction of relevant socialist literature. In this process of transformation and renewal, which signifies an abrupt departure from the socialist realism of the Stalin era, the role of landmark on the road to the future falls to Solzhenitsyn's story." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (45)

cancer, then and now
Very interesting. Good description of cancer therapy, which hasn't changed much since the '50's.Well written.

Not to be Missed
As with the opening "Arrest" chapter of Gulag Archipelago, and the start of The First Circle, so with Cancer Ward: the reader shares the protagonist's horror as he is yanked from all he knows and flung into a hellish and alien environment, a madhouse where he lands among residents, many terrified like himself, many old-timers who seem to know no other life but that of getting shoved around like cattle. I read this first in German, in which I am NOT proficient, yet the sense of panic came through loud and clear. Solzhenitsyn is a real-life, modern-day Ishmael, one who escaped alone not merely to tell us but to show us , to make us feel the horror of life interrupted, then turned into a living Hell created by a state gone mad," like a blind red rhinoceros[quoth Chad Walsh] ", turning life into a lethal obstacle course known to most of us in the West only from nightmares and Stephen King. Comfortable in our lives, we read books like Roots and Sacred Hunger, and The Pawnbroker, and Cancer War, and come away changed, wiser and sadder most likely, certainly more wary and vigilant.

Read this book
Okay, so I should probably hold off on writing a review until I've actually finished the book. However, I picked Cancer Ward up a day or so ago and I am finding it to be a fantastic read. I'm actually bringing it with me as reading material on my upcoming plane flight to my honeymoon destination--now, isn't that romantic? Well, perhaps not...but it really is that good. I'll leave the plot summary and character commentary to others--I just want to say this is a darn good read.

Delicious Reading
The reason i call this "delicious," is because the writing is so fantastic, wonderful, beautiful, awesome... that you can feel, taste, smell, see everything you are reading.Reading a book like this makes you feel blessed that you HAVE EYES.

I'm an AVID reader, and this book is really special.the only reason i couldnt give it the full amount of Stars is because of the names in the story...ugh!Maybe it's because of my age or meds i'm on, but with the Russian names being two names, and then also some kind of first name... i was very confused.I wish the author or translator could have just used ONE name for each character... and stuck with it.I know that's not how it's done - lol - but it would have made it so much easier for me to follow the story.I had to keep going back to try to figure out who was who, with which illness.It was well worth it, though.

Solzehnitsyn masters fiction, as he mastered non-fiction in Gulag Archipellago
Is there anything worse than living in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union? ...unfortunately the author learned the answer to this question is: "living in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union with cancer". I'm not a fan of medical dramas, but it would be unfair to pigeonhole The Cancer Ward as strictly a medical drama. It is much more an exploration of the lives of the different men who inhabit a 1950's era Soviet oncology ward. The men come from a mix of cultural, ethnic, and social-status backgrounds, and at times the author does use them to advantage for commentary on elements in Soviet life, but Solzhenitzen never allows the social commentary to overpower his handling of the characters. He is a cancer survivor too, and he draws heavily from his own experience. The book is at its best when showing how cancer recasts one's priorities, particularly the last several chapters, which follow Oleg after his discharge from the cancer ward. It is here that Solzhenitsen so artistically renders the world transformed through the eyes of a cancer patient.
This book is not like Gulag Archipellago, but is wonderful in its own, much more personal way. The fact that Solzhenitsyn produced both of these works is a testiment to his craftmanship as both a storyteller and a first-person historian. ... Read more