Cancer Ward - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

The novel is set in a hospital in Soviet Uzbekistan in 1955. As the title suggests, the plot focuses on a group of cancer patients as they undergo therapy. The novel deals with political theories, mortality, and hope — themes that are often explored either through descriptive passages or the conversations the characters have within the ward, which is a microcosm of the post-Stalin Russian Communist government.

Also explored is the effect life in the labour camps will have on a man's life, as Oleg Kostoglotov, the main character, is shocked to discover the materialist world of the city outside the cancer ward. Oleg is in "Perpetual Exile" in Ush-Terek, in Kazakhstan.

Bureaucracy and the nature of power in Stalin's state is represented by Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a "personnel officer". The corrupt power of Stalin's regime is shown through his dual desires to be a "worker" but also achieve a "special pension". At the end, Rusanov's wife drops rubbish from her car window, symbolising the carelessness with which the regime treated the country.

The novel is partly autobiographical. The character Oleg Kostoglotov was admitted to the hospital from a gulag, similar to Solzhenitsyn, and later subjected to internal exile in the same region of the USSR. Oleg is depicted as being born in Leningrad, while Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk.

Some Uzbek landmarks are mentioned in the novel, such as the trolleyline and Chorsu Bazaar. The zoo Oleg visits is now a soccer field near Mirabad Amusement Park.

Kostoglotov begins two romances in the hospital, one with Zoya, a nurse and doctor in training, though the attraction is mostly physical, and a more serious one with Vera Gangart, one of his doctors, a middle-aged woman who has never married, and whom he imagines he might ask to become his wife. Both women invite him to stay overnight in their apartment, ostensibly only as a friend, after he is discharged, because he has nowhere to sleep — his status as an exile makes finding a place to lodge difficult.

His feelings for Vera are strong, and seem to be reciprocated, though neither of them has spoken of it directly:

He could not think of her either with greed or with the fury of passion. His one joy would be to go and lie at her feet like a dog, like a miserable beaten cur, to lie on the floor and breathe on her feet like a cur. That would be a happiness greater than anything he could imagine."

After wandering around the town, he decides against going to see either woman. He does find the courage to go to Vera's once, but he has left it so late in the day that she is no longer there, and he decides not to try again. He is well aware that the hormone therapy used as part of his cancer treatment may have left him impotent, just as imprisonment and exile have taken all the life out of him. He feels he has nothing left to offer a woman, and that his past means he would always feel out of place in what he sees as normal life. Instead, he decides to accept less from life than he had hoped for, and to face it alone. He heads to the railway station to fight his way onto a train to Ush-Terek. He writes a goodbye letter to Vera from the station:

You may disagree, but I have a prediction to make: even before you drift into the indifference of old age, you will come to bless this day, the day you did not commit yourself to share my life ... Now that I am going away ... I can tell you quite frankly: even when we were having the most intellectual conversations and I honestly thought and believed everything I said, I still wanted all the time, all the time, to pick you up and kiss you on the lips.

So try to work that out.

And now, without your permission, I kiss them.