Does the story of the Cancer Ward correspond to reality? Solzhenitsyn "Cancer Ward" - analysis

Most main question, which is asked to the characters throughout the novel, is the question posed by Efrem Podduev: “How are people alive?” Kostoglotov gave Ephraim a small blue book with gold painting; he would not even read it if it were not for his illness, and little story with the title "What do people live for" interested Ephraim. The name itself was as if he had composed it himself. Having asked this question to his neighbors in the ward, Ephraim received whole line answers, but not a single person said what this story taught. Food and clothing allowance - answered Ahmadzhan, salary - added the nurse Turgun. Air, water and food - said Demka. Qualification - answered Proshka. Pavel Nikolayevich said that by ideological and public good. It is surprising that all their answers are to some extent too material, no one thinks about kindness, love, friendship. After all, the question itself seems to lead to an answer. These people are in the hospital, they are ill with one of the most terrible diseases, some are fatal, and it doesn’t even occur to them that a person can think about something high and spiritual. After all, just before death, many people begin to understand highest value life, but for some reason these thoughts did not touch them, and even lying in a hospital bed, they only care about material things. It is not without reason that Solzhenitsyn emphasizes before Akhmadjan's answer that he is recovering, a man who has almost recovered from a terrible illness has not even thought about what a gift life has presented him with this, for him its meaning is still in material contentment. It is also amazing that all their answers are related solely to taking care of themselves, not a word about their loved ones and other people, even about their children. Only Sibgatov's answer gives hope: Motherland. But he doesn't mean high concept Motherland, but the fact that in native places the disease will not become attached. Ephraim himself is surprised at the answers of his neighbors and understands that he would have answered the same way before, that a person is alive with air, water, food and alcohol, and he thought like that all his life. But a little story by Leo Tolstoy made Ephraim think, completely overestimate his outlook on life. It was even somehow strange for him to tell everyone, he didn’t say it out loud, it was indecent, but at the same time it was right that people live by love for others. This answer caused a wave of indignation in Rusanov, he began to demand the name of the author who could write such nonsense. Other heroes did not answer anything, probably, they also do not understand how people can be alive with love, not only for themselves, but for others. In addition to this conversation, Efrem also addresses this question to a new patient - Vadim Zatsyrko. He replies that creativity is really a "human" answer to the question. Demka also asks this question to the girl Asya, she, in turn, replies that love seems to be here - only person, who correctly answered this question, because that's what it said in the book - love. But Asya means by the word love is not at all what was said in the book, not love for other people, but love between a man and a woman, and love is not even spiritual, but physical. After all, when Asya realizes that she will have an operation, she asks: why live, who will need me now. It seems wild to her that Demka is trying to explain to her: people love for their character. What kind of love was she talking about then?

It seems that the question of how people are alive affected only one Ephraim. He was always strong man, worked, enjoyed life and never got sick. I got sick only once and immediately got cancer. “All his life he was prepared for life,” writes Solzhenitsyn. But after the first operations, he stopped liking work and fun. He always believed that a good specialty or acumen is required from a person, there was money from all this, but when you find yourself sick with something fatal, you don’t need any acumen or specialty, it turns out that you are a weakling and something important in life missed. The little blue book made me reconsider many of Ephraim's principles. He analyzed his past, his actions and the actions of other people, but somehow everyone acted wrong, not according to the book. When everyone in the ward talks about spontaneous healing, Ephraim says that this requires a clear conscience, that he himself “ruined” many women, left them with their children, made them cry, and therefore his tumor will not resolve. Before his death, Ephraim fully repented of his sins, he realized that he had lived wrongly and that everything that he had previously considered a full-fledged life was not life at all. That life, it turns out, lies in something else - in love for others. Ephraim does not forgive himself for past mistakes, but the author and readers forgive him. But his conscience torments him to the end, and he understands that he won’t have time to fix anything, soon death awaits him ... Ephraim has no choice but to convince and scare others that there’s nowhere to go from here and never to anyone from this cancer the corps did not leave, and this prediction completely came true: as soon as Ephraim was discharged, he died at the station.

Most of all, having heard the answer that people are alive with love, Rusanov is indignant. "No, that's not our morality!" - he answers Ephraim. According to Rusanov, people are alive with ideology and the public good. Pavel Nikolaevich Rusanov works in the field of questionnaires. He considers his low and vile work - to expose people to fear, bring them to trial and even send them to prison - "openwork fine work" that requires a lot of effort, because about any person, if you search well, you can find something suspicious, everyone a person is guilty of something, hiding something. And with the help of his excellent profiles, Rusanov finds out what this person is hiding. He believes that people respect him for his work, that his position is isolated, mysterious and semi-otherworldly. All this, in his opinion, he does for the benefit of society, so that all liars, brave and abstruse, disappear, and people of principle, stability, such as Rusanov, would walk with their heads held high. Rusanov even has three stages of intimidating people: which one he uses depends on the degree of guilt of the person. With the help of his ingenious ways, he makes people nervous and worried, and his profiles will reveal what is in a person’s head. He is proud that, with the help of his profiles, he managed to achieve divorces for several women who tried to help their husbands in exile. There is also a “tambour” in front of his office, a safety box a meter deep, and a person entering the office is imprisoned for a few seconds, he feels his insignificance, in the vestibule a person “parts” with his impudence and self-wisdom. And of course, people enter his office only one at a time. Rusanov believes that his work gives him the opportunity to know true processes life. Other people see life as production, meetings, a canteen, a club, etc. But the true direction of life was decided in “quiet offices between two or three people who understand each other or an affectionate phone call. The true life was still flowing in secret papers, in the depths of the portfolios of Rusanov and his employees. Rusanov is an informer, he “knocks” on people, and not only for the public good, but also for his own personal goals, but his whole family and he himself treat his work with respectable awe and consider it very important and noble. So, for the sake of the apartment that he and his wife shared with the family of his old friend, he filed a material against him that Rodichev was going to create a group of pests. Together with Rodichev, the secretary of the factory party committee, Guzun, was sent into exile, who resisted the exclusion of Rodichev from the party. And now, when Rusanov's wife, Kapitolina Matveevna, told him that her brother saw Rodichev, Rusanov is overcome by a terrible fear that all those people who suffered because of him will return and he himself will suffer from them. He thinks that it is better to die than to wait for each return with fear, and believes that they should not be returned, because they are already accustomed to that exile life, and here they will stir up the lives of other people. Because of his selfishness and desire that everything be fine only with him, Rusanov does not even think that he broke many people's lives and that for them the return from exile is the beginning of a new life, happiness. For him, the main thing in life is the peace of himself and his family, and Rusanov will always have dirt on those who can interfere with this.

The change in the supreme court is what really shocked Rusanov, because it almost means that he was left without protection. After reading about it in the newspaper, Rusanov has a nightmare. In it, he first sees a girl, whose mother he denounced, after which the girl was poisoned. Then it seems to him that he has lost some important piece of paper. After a woman who was imprisoned because of him, and she entrusted him with her daughter, whom he gave to an orphanage. And now the mother wants to know where her daughter is, but Rusanov cannot tell her this, because he himself does not know. And it all ends with the fact that he is called to the Supreme Court, and Rusanov is terribly afraid, because now he has no protection there. On the website of Saratov state university I found an article by O.V. Garkavenko “That true, natural sound…” Christian motives in A.I. Solzhenitsyn " cancer corps". In it, the meaning of Rusanov's dream is interpreted as follows:

“In the confused mind of a bureaucrat-informer, official everyday life is intertwined with its phone calls "from below" and "from above", a newspaper article read during the day and events of the distant past. However, the deep meaning of this dream is revealed only in the context of Christian symbolism. Rusanov's dream is a model of his posthumous existence, a warning about what awaits him in another world. “He crawled. He crawled along some kind of concrete pipe, not a pipe, but a tunnel, or something, where unfinished reinforcement was sticking out of the sides, and sometimes he clung to it with the right side of his neck, the sick one. He crawled on his chest and most of all felt the weight of the body pressing him to the ground. This heaviness was much more than the weight of his body, he was not used to such heaviness, he was simply flattened. He thought at first that it was concrete pressing down from above - no, it was his body that was so heavy. He felt it and dragged it like a sack of scrap iron. He thought that with such a weight he would probably not get up on his feet, but the main thing would be to crawl out of this passage, at least breathe, at least look at the light. But the passage didn’t end, didn’t end, didn’t end” Rusanov, in Christian terminology, a purely carnal person, is doomed to drag this carnal burden posthumously, which makes us recall the words of the Apostle Paul: “He who sows to his flesh from the flesh will reap corruption.” Further, Pavel Nikolaevich hears, “how someone’s voice - but without a voice, but conveying only thoughts, commanded him to crawl sideways. How can I crawl there if there is a wall? he thought. But with the same heaviness with which his body flattened, he had an inevitable command to crawl to the left. He grunted and crawled - indeed, he crawled just as straight as before. The Holy Scripture says that at the Last Judgment some will be on the right side of the Savior, others on the left. "And these shall go away into everlasting punishment." Given the Christian symbolism of the right and left sides, it is interesting to note that Rusanov's tumor is on the right. Crawling through the tunnel, he clings to the unfinished rebar, "and just the right side of the neck, sick." This detail is persistently repeated. So, having heard the voice of Yelchanskaya, one of the many victims of his denunciations, Rusanov felt "how much it stung in the neck, on the right side." But suddenly, crawling along the tunnel, Pavel Nikolayevich, following the first order, hears a new one, strange to him: “Only he got used to it - the same intelligible voice told him to turn to the right, but quickly. He earned with his elbows and feet, and although there was an impenetrable wall on the right, he crawled, and it seemed to work out. What is this? Perhaps the last act of Divine mercy, the last call to repentance, a reminder that this path is not closed to any person until the last hour of his earthly life? But the "impenetrable wall" of the heavy burden of unrepentant sins blocks this saving path for Rusanov. “All the time he clung to his neck, but it reverberated in his head. He had never been so hard in his life, and it would be most insulting if he died here without crawling. But suddenly his legs felt better - they became light, as if they had been inflated with air, and his legs began to rise<…>. He listened - there was no command for him.<…>he began to back away and, squeezing himself on his hands, - where did the strength come from? - began to climb after the legs back through the hole.<…>And he ended up on a pipe, among some construction, only deserted, obviously the working day was over. There was muddy marshy ground all around. Crawling through the tunnel, Pavel Nikolaevich passionately wished to “at least look at the light”, “but neither light nor end could be seen”. There is no light even at an abandoned construction site: “Everything around was uncertain, nothing could be seen in the distance. This allows us to assume that we are talking about hellish space: "Hell<…>in word formation from Greek, means a place devoid of light. (It is also noteworthy that Rusanov meets the suicidal girl here, but not Yelchanskaya. He only feels the touch of a hand and hears her voice, but does not see her on a deserted construction site). It is here that Rusanov crawls through the deadly disease that put an end to his self-will, through recent months or weeks of earthly existence. But he still does not realize in which particular "New Supreme Court" calls his voice "from above" from handset. The victims of his denunciations, shown to Pavel Nikolayevich, arouse in him not repentance, but only an animal fear of exposure. The horror is aggravated by a meeting with a mysterious "guy in a welder's canvas jacket, with wings on his shoulders", who knows his innermost deeds and thoughts. Biblical allusions are also heard in the question that Yelchanskaya asks Rusanov: “My friend!<..>Tell me, where is my daughter? To this question, he, who once killed both the Elchansky spouses and their child sent to an orphanage, cannot give a clear answer. “And the Lord said to Cain, Where is Abel your brother? He said: I don't know; Am I my brother's keeper?" Somewhat earlier, barely freed from the pipe, Rusanov asks a similar question (due to the inertia of his earthly existence - still with a judicial intonation) to a suicidal girl, the daughter of a presser Grusha: “Girl, where is your mother?<...>“And I want to ask you,” the girl looked. It is after this dialogue that Pavel Nikolaevich begins to experience an excruciating thirst, which he never manages to quench: he did not get to the trough with rain water, and the decanters on the tables were all empty. The materialistic justification for this throat-burning thirst is the effect of embihin. But in Holy Scripture, thirst often metaphorically expresses a state of distance from God. And in the light biblical symbolism this detail is a sign of the final spiritual death of Rusanov. "Those who turn away from Me will be written in the dust, because they have forsaken the Lord, the source of living water."

In his dream, Rusanov remembers the innocent people he imprisoned, but he does not feel remorse for this. Rusanov, like Svidrigailov from Crime and Punishment, dreams of people who committed suicide because of him. Svidrigailov dreams of a girl who hanged herself because he insulted her, and his wife constantly sees him as a ghost. Svidrigailov commits crimes in order to assert his will, to fully feel his freedom to do both good and evil, creating moral and ethical standards for himself. Rusanov, on the other hand, does evil for the sake of his own well-being and does not repent at all.

So, even cancer and the fear of death could not make Rusanov understand that he was living wrong. For him, the meaning of life still remains in the public good and in his "noble work".

Rusanov's daughter, Avietta, is in many ways similar to her father. She is smart and strong. Avietta is an aspiring poetess, it is immediately clear from her that she will achieve everything in life, and she will achieve all this in the same ways, low and vile, as her father. Aviette is in many ways a copy of her dad, she only thinks about how to break into people, travels to Moscow to show herself and look at what kind of furniture is there in Moscow, furniture is even more important to her own creativity. She assures Demka that sincerity is harmful in literature and is not needed at all, Avietta believes that it is better to tell people lies than to talk about how it really is.

The complete opposite of the father is his son Yura. He tells his father a story that a man was carrying groceries, and a storm started in the middle of the road, and he had to leave the car and go to the nearest settlement. The next morning it turned out that one box was missing, the driver was blamed for everything and put in jail. The father fully agrees with the verdict and says that even if he didn’t take it, how can you leave state property like that ??? He is very upset that his son against and even wrote a protest. According to Yura, the man had no choice, otherwise he would have died. This torments Rusanov, torments him that he could not instill his point of view in his son.

The whole Rusanov family considers themselves superior to other people, they all think that the father has an honest job and that he does only good things, that he recognizes criminals. Solzhenitsyn also writes about the Rusanov family, at first glance, a completely absurd phrase, but in which their whole essence is expressed: “The Rusanovs loved the people - their great people and served this people, and were ready to give their lives for the people. But over the years they could no longer endure - the population. This obstinate, always evading, resisting and even demanding something of the population ”I would like to ask a question: is the population not the people ??? Here it is - the mask of the Rusanov family: they say that they love everyone, that they are honest and kind people, but in fact they love only themselves, and despise others.

Librarian Shulubin appears in the ward unnoticed and does not want to communicate with anyone. They called him an “owl” behind his eyes, he usually looked at someone with round eyes for a very long time. His tumor is in the most humiliating place, and therefore Shulubin is worried that after the operation no one will sit next to him, and even now he does not want to talk to anyone, because it is not customary to talk about such an illness. Previously, he lectured in several specialties, but professors began to be "hushed up". And from that moment on, Shulubin bent his back and was silent: “Should I have admitted mistakes? I recognized them! Should I have given up? I renounced! … Should I have left the lectures? I left! ... Textbooks of great scientists were destroyed, programs were changed - well, I agree! So he went to an ordinary librarian, but even there he was forced to destroy books on genetics, and he obediently put them in the stove. And he did all this for the sake of his wife and his children, not even for himself. But the wife died, the children grew up and left their father. It turns out that everything he did is meaningless! He lived for the children, but they abandoned him, spat in the soul. And it turns out that life is lived in vain. He was silent all his life, bent over and thought that he had provided the life of other people with his torment and betrayal, while he himself did not deserve even a little thought. And now, at the end of his life, he realizes that he was wrong in everything, that he lived wrong, that he chose the meaning of life not at all what he needed, and now it’s too late to change anything.

A sixteen-year-old boy Demka lies in the cancer ward, he is young, just starting to live and is already facing such a terrible disease as cancer. Demka's father died when he was two years old, after his stepfather, who soon left his mother. Since then, she has taken men to the house in the only room with Dema, all this makes him disgusted with what his peers thought “with a shudder”. Because of her mother's behavior, Demka does not believe in love and shuns women. He left his mother to live with a school watchman, after which he moved to a factory village and lived in a hostel. Demka has a difficult life, he was always not full, he was malnourished all his life. He worked diligently, did not drink, did not walk, but only studied. Demo reads all the time, he was even allowed to go to the bookcase of the senior laboratory assistant, for him literature is a teacher of life. He wanted to do social life , go to university, but one game of football, which he occasionally allowed himself to play with friends, turned everything upside down, made him find himself here in the cancer ward. Someone accidentally hit Demka on the shin with a ball. I would like to ask the question, why is it so unfair? Demka asks this question to Aunt Stefa, whom he met in the cancer ward. To which she replies that everything is visible to God, we must submit. But Dema categorically disagrees with this, for him religion is dope. In his opinion, why, if God can see everything, some people have a smooth life, without problems, while others have everything cut up. And when Ephraim asks Demka the question “How do people live”, Demka answers that with air, water and food. On the one hand, Demka does not recognize any spiritual value, the main thing for him is work and study, but, on the other hand, he is constantly trying to learn something new, conversations, asks everyone endless questions of interest to him, and we understand that when Demka grows up, he will surely understand that the meaning of life is not at all in the air and food. But while Demka does not even recognize love, neither spiritual nor physical. Until he meets Asya. Asya seemed to him beautiful, like from a movie, such girls were unattainable for him. He would never have dared to get to know her, but he saw her - and in his chest it swelled. So he waited until Asya herself met him. Asya is so easy, unconstrained ... her fun seemed to overflow to Demka. When Demka tells her that they want to cut off his leg, she exclaims in horror that it is better to die than to live without a leg. - "Life is given for happiness!". And Demka wants to agree with her in everything, what kind of life is it with a crutch ??? Life is for happiness! She answers the question why a person lives - “For love, of course!” He says that there is nothing in life but love. “This is always ours!...Love!! - and that's it!!" Demka is alien to the word love, he objects that love is not the whole life, that it is only a certain period, to which Asya claims that at their age everything is sweet. Asya is open with him, their conversation is so easy, as if they have known each other for a very long time. And that love, which had previously disgusted him, appeared to him as something innocent and undefiled. And even a sore leg with eternal gnawing pain was forgotten for a while ... And when Asya bursts into his ward with terrible news that she will be operated on, and cries that no one will need her now, Demka says that he needs her and that he even marries her willingly. So, thanks to the meeting with Asya, Demka understands and cognizes love. Demo is terribly afraid of losing his leg: “But no matter how they take it away. No matter how cut. No matter how much you have to give." For him, losing a leg at the age of sixteen is tantamount to death, what kind of life would it be without it??? Therefore, Demka willingly agrees to X-ray therapy, because he thinks that this is instead of surgery. But time and unbearable pain did their job. The sore leg began to seem to Demka not precious for life, but a burden that I want to get rid of as soon as possible. The operation now seemed to him salvation, not the end of life. And Demka, after consulting with everyone, decided on an operation. After her, he did not leave his desires, Demka still wants to go to university. But he still has one more dream - to go to the zoo. He dreams that he will be discharged, and he will walk around the zoo all day, get acquainted with different animals. And then he will return to his home and devote himself to his studies, because now he will not need to go to the dance floor or play with friends. All the time will be only for study.

The fate of the Ukrainian guy Proshka is tragic in that they don’t even tell him what awaits him, they just let him go… as it seems, to freedom, but in fact…. He is the only one of the patients who did not complain about anything and did not have any external lesions. A swarthy, young guy. He is also very afraid of the operation, and suddenly, during the examination, the doctor tells him that he is being discharged. Proshka is unspeakably happy, they are discharged without surgery! Ustinova tells him that he cannot work and lift heavy things, that he will be given a disability and he will live on it. But Proshka refuses this, for him life is work: "I'm still young, I want to be shy." And to the question “How do people live?” Proshka also answers that with qualifications. Proshka's certificate has a strange inscription - Tumor cordis, casus inoperabilis. He approaches Kostoglotov for help, so that he translates this for him. Oleg, who once took Latin lessons, translates this inscription. A tumor of the heart, a case not amenable to surgery, she says. Oleg does not tell Proshka about this, and the happy guy leaves the hospital, it seems, into a new life, but in fact he goes to death ...

Vadim Zatsyrko, having already arrived at the cancer ward, knows that he has the most dangerous type of tumor - melanoblastoma. Which means he only has eight months left to live. Vadim is engaged in geology, he devoted himself entirely to his work, he also has a very friendly family - his mother and two more brothers. The disease caught him at the most necessary moment, when he was on the verge of opening a new search for ore deposits in radioactive waters. He was born with a large pigment spot on his leg, and his mother, worried about her son, decided to have an operation, which most likely caused him to get cancer. From childhood, Vadim had a premonition that he would not have enough time. He was always annoyed by empty talk, watery books and films, useless radio broadcasts, etc. It was as if from childhood he felt that he would die so early, at 27 years old. All his life he seemed to be racing with his still invisible tumor. And she finally caught up with him. But Vadim accepted death, for him now the most important thing is what he will have time to do in the short time that is given to him. He dreams of being given at least three years, no more, he would have done everything! But he had only a few months left, and then he would spend them in a hospital bed. The only hope left is that the mother will be able to find colloidal gold that will somehow stop the spread of metastases. To the question “how people are alive”, which Ephraim asks him, Vadim replies that it is creativity. And he also mentions that for him the meaning of life is only in movement. For Vadim, his work is the most important thing in life. He tried with all his might to help science, to leave people behind a new method of searching for ores. He compares himself with the young Lermontov, who left a mark on literature, and left it forever, but Vadim will not be able to leave a mark after himself, he will not have enough time ... He could do so much, discover so many new things, see ... If at first Vadim had there was still a small hope that he would break out, jump out, then soon, after a month spent in the dispensary, a whole month, during which, in freedom, he could still do at least something, he lost it, he no longer even wanted to read books . “To carry a talent in oneself that has not yet thundered, bursting you is torment and duty, but dying with it - not yet flared up, not discharged - is much more tragic.” When he is finally informed that colloidal gold will soon be brought, Vadim literally comes to life, he thinks that the gold will protect his entire body, and that his leg can be sacrificed for the sake of life. He does not sleep at night, he thinks about gold, but he does not suspect that doctors deliberately examine his whole body, hiding the fact that, in fact, metastases have already been transferred to the liver, and gold is unlikely to help here. Even before the news about the gold, Vadim begins to feel that everything he has devoted his life to does not make any sense at all. That he has been in a hurry all his life to prove his experience, and what now? He will die soon... And why then was this done? So that it remains undiscovered and unproven? It turns out that he lived his whole life in vain, he was in a hurry for something ... he tried ... And all his former meaning of life, enclosed in work, does not mean anything ... But, however, as soon as he finds out that the gold will still be brought, he again dreams of work, that the race for life will begin again. Probably, only before a new threat of death, Vadim will think about true sense life, which is not work at all.

One day, a new patient suddenly appears in the ward, who gives the oppressed people a charge of vivacity and his incredible optimism - this is Vadim Chaly. He bursts into the ward like a stream of refreshing wind, stirring the sick. A confident smile plays on his face, his face is ingenuous and prepossessing. It seems that he is not sick at all, he talks so simply about his stomach operation, as if it were like taking medicine: “The ventricle is chopped off. Cut out three quarters. He reassures Rusanov, says that in order not to die, one should be less upset. "Life always wins!" - that's his motto. And after all these optimistic words, Rusanov really wonders why live with gloomy thoughts? We can say that the arrival of Chaly is like a ray of light and an example to people who are oppressed, who have already come to terms with their illness, how to treat it! Always with a smile! But it is very interesting that of all the patients, Chaly got along the most with Rusanov. This can only be explained by the fact that he, like Rusanov, is ready to overcome all obstacles in his path for his own pleasure. Chaly is not at all as kind and good as it seems, his meaning of life is only to eat enough, enjoy women and money, he, like Rusanov, thinks only of himself. His dreams are material and low, just like those of Pavel Nikolaevich.

The fate of doctors in the cancer ward is very difficult. One of the problems that gnaws at them all is that they are unable to cure their patients, that they are powerless. Lyudmila Afanasyevna Dontsova is the head of the radiotherapy department. She constantly thinks about Sibgatov, that she once cured him, cured him with an x-ray, but from him all the other tissues were almost on the verge of a new tumor, and from a simple bruise he got a new tumor, and no x-ray can defeat her it was impossible. Powerlessness in front of the sick, doomed to death, like a cross, falls on the soul of doctors. And they also demand from above to increase the turnover of beds, that is, to discharge the doomed so that they die outside the dispensary, and for some, like Proshka, not even to say that he is terminally ill. All this depresses Dontsova, she thinks about her work and about the X-ray, through which every patient of the body passes, irradiating herself with thousands of “er”, killing diseased cells and hitting healthy ones, like a vicious circle ... People who were cured of cancer by X-rays in their youth returned later with a new cancer, but in other unexpected places. Such cases caused Dontsova shock and an inexcusable feeling of guilt... And, thinking about those many whom she cured, she realizes that she will never forget those few whom she could not save anyway. Dontsova thinks about the right of doctors to treat, because what Oleg says is true: “Why do you even take upon yourself the right to decide for another person? After all, this is a terrible right, it rarely leads to good. Be afraid of him! It is not given to a doctor either! But Dontsova objects to him that it was given first of all to a doctor, but she herself understands that it is not fair not to tell people about what they are ill with and how they are treated, that doctors have no right to decide whether a person needs this treatment or not, because only a person decides what to choose. Dontsova has been working here for twenty years, every day she breathes air saturated with X-rays, and for a long time she has been feeling pressing, sometimes sharp pain in the stomach area. But no one wants to believe that he has cancer. Dontsova goes to her old friend Dormidont Tikhonovich with a request to examine her stomach. She says that it is easier for her not to know her diagnosis, so as not to suffer and not suspect what will happen to her, she argues why it was she, an oncologist, who suffered from an oncological disease, what kind of injustice? But Oreshchenkov objects that this is justice. He does not work in any of the clinics himself, he runs a private practice and tried hard to be allowed to do so. Oreshenkov loves his job, loves to help people, but in last years of his life, his main pastime is deepening into himself, into his thoughts. For him, the whole meaning of existence is presented not in the activities of people, which they were constantly engaged in, but in “how much they managed to keep unclouded, unshuddered, undistorted - the image of eternity, planted by everyone.” Literally everything turned upside down in Dontsova due to illness in a few days. What used to be so well known is now completely alien, unfamiliar. The thought of her being sick was unbearable. Suddenly it turned out that life is so beautiful and so impossible to part with it! She understood what kind of tumor she had, at the entrance of the stomach, and this is one of the most difficult cases. On her last round, she could not help but leave a single patient, she wanted to help so much. And again Sibgatov was remembered, how much was invested in him, and nothing helped. But at the same time, a healthy Akhmadzhan was being discharged, and Vadim should soon bring gold, and Rusanov should be discharged ... But all this is still nothing compared to those whom Dontsova still could not save.

Also tormented by the conscience of the surgeon Yevgeny Ustinova. She believes that the best surgeries are those that have been avoided. The chief surgeon Lev Leonidovich is tormented by the fact that he constantly has to deceive the patients, not telling them the truth about their illnesses. Speak innocuous names like ulcers, gastritis, inflammation, polyps instead of cancer or sarcoma. So people are completely unaware of what awaits them, they are given unnecessary hope that everything is fine with them. And this lie is also a heavy burden on the souls of doctors.

Zoya is a young girl, she is studying to be a doctor and working in a cancer ward at the same time, because their grandmother's pension is not enough for them. She is young, full of energy, busy all the time, no wonder Oleg calls her Bee. Zoya believes that life should be taken in a hurry, as soon as possible and as fully as possible. In the novel, very little is written about Zoya's inner world, about her feelings and emotions. I believe that this is because Zoya has yet to understand the meaning of her life.

Main character story - Oleg Kostoglotov. He is 34 years old; when Oleg was a student, he and his friends were "raked in". They were ordinary students: they had fun, studied, looked after girls, but they talked about politics, and something didn’t suit them there, and before the exams they were all taken away, even the girls. And exiled forever. Forever...a terrible word...now never to return to the Motherland, even dead, even when the sun goes out... He was exiled to Ush-Terek. Oleg seems to hate the place of exile, but, on the contrary, he only dreams of returning to dear Ush-Terek again. Oleg is thinking about walking around Ush-Terek at night, watching a movie and sitting in a tea room. This perception of the place of exile has developed because of the Kadmin family. No matter what happens in exile, they always repeat: “How good! How much better than it was! How lucky we are to have found this lovely place!” All sorts of little things, like a loaf of bread, good movie, The admins perceived it as an incredible joy. And Oleg fully agrees with their position, because it is not the level of well-being that makes people happy, but their point of view on their lives. And he just wants to jump out of the ticks of the cancer cell, go to Ush-Terek to get married!

Oleg himself says that his life was too poor in luck. He used to not trust everyone, to suspect, to argue. Oleg cannot come to terms with the fact that he is being treated, but not explained. He asks Nurse Zoya for a book on cancer treatment to understand what exactly is being done to him. He wants to know what the method of treatment is, what are the prospects and complications. He tries to find out from all the doctors how this x-ray works. He dreams of stopping the treatment, he does not want to be retreated. He tries to persuade the doctors to quickly write him out, but is rebuffed. Oleg arrived at the cancer ward almost lifeless, now he has recovered, at least outwardly, he feels great and wants to live in this wonderful state for at least a year, the more he tortures himself with x-rays. Kostoglotov has a negative attitude towards blood transfusion, he does not want someone else's ... Oleg does not trust anyone at all, even someone else's blood ...

Soon after five weeks of treatment, Oleg was unrecognisable, the treatment killed his former life in him, now, as he himself says, harmful treatment has begun. In a letter to Kadmin, he writes that he does not ask long life who does not want either Leningrad or Rio de Janeiro, he only wants to go to modest Ush-Terek. He talks about how much you can pay for life, and how much you can’t, what is the upper price of life? And he understands that for the preservation of his life he pays the most expensive, he pays with what gives color to life. He turns into a walking scheme, he gets life with digestion, breathing, muscular and brain activity, and for what to him it??? His whole life is already lost, and fate does not bode well, and in him they also kill the last feelings, the delights of life, artificially kill, hiding behind the fact that they are saving his life, and why save such a life?

And now he is being discharged, his long-awaited freedom, he is about to return to Ush-Terek, but there is still a lot to do: you need to visit the zoo, on the advice of Demka, take a walk around the city, see flowering apricots, and Vega and Zoya gave him their addresses! “It was the morning of creation! The world was created again for the sole purpose of returning to Oleg: go! Live! Now, uncertainly, but a new Kostoglotov came out of the clinic, he felt that this new life, and so I wanted it not to look like the old one. At 34, Oleg for the first time in his life saw a blooming apricot, a transparent pink miracle, and tried a shish kebab, and all his life could not be compared with this wonderful day! Unexpected discoveries haunted Oleg at every step: the telegraph, something that was recently written about in fantasy books now reality, and the central department store, he simply could not go there! Cameras, plates, things - all this was not yet available recently, but now it lies on the shelves and beckons. But all this is too expensive for Oleg, too much, and a man who approaches expensive silk shirts and asks the saleswoman for a specific collar number strikes Oleg. Collar number... people have nothing to eat, much less to wear, and this clean-shaven and pomaded even collar buys a certain collar for himself, all this is wild for Oleg, he does not understand why such a sophisticated life ??? He sees himself in the mirror... before that he was flying down the street, feeling new, renewed, and now he sees himself in the mirror, ragged, in old clothes and boots, like a beggar... And that's it - confidence disappears, but he needs to go to Vega , And How??? In this form??? Oleg understands that he can’t fit into this life at all, he missed too much, he’s a stranger here ... he can’t even buy a gift for Vega, because all of a sudden it’s already out of fashion, but what to give a woman in general ??? Oleg is afraid, and all because of this department store, all because he realized that he was not created for this life, the life of large department stores, phototelegraphs and collar numbers. He came to her, but was late, and now even dear Ush-Terek does not seem so alluring, now I just want to return to Vega. "But it was more forbidden than impossible."

Conclusion

The problem of the meaning of life is the main one in A.I. Solzhenitsyn "Cancer Ward". In relation to this main problem Heroes can be roughly divided into four groups. To the first group, I would include those who do not care about the meaning of life, since the answer to it is clear to them. One way or another, their views boil down to hedonism, utilitarianism and materialism. Rusanov, Avietta, Chaly live for their own pleasure, although they believe that they bring benefits to others; they do not see any higher meaning of life and do not believe in it. The difference between them is only in what moral boundaries they are willing to cross in order to live the way they want.

The second group are heroes who, under the influence of illness and approaching death, became disillusioned with the former meaning of life (Vadim Zatsyrko), who strictly judge themselves for a life lived incorrectly (Efrem Podduev, Shulubin) and vaguely guess about the existence of some other, non-material meaning of life .

7) Philosophical Dictionary / I. T. Frolova - M. 1991. - 843s.

8) Philosophical Dictionary / P. S. Gurevich - M. 1997. - 994s.

9) How does a person live / / Literary review No. 7 / E. M. Shklovsky - M. 1990 - 30s.

10) Shukhov and others: models of human behavior in the camp world / K. G. Krasnov - L. 1984. - 48s.

To the work of the great genius, laureate Nobel Prize, a man about whom so much has been said, it’s scary to touch, but I can’t help but write about his story “Cancer Ward” - a work to which he gave, albeit a small, but part of his life, which they tried to deprive him of for many years. But he clung to life and endured all the hardships of the concentration camps, all their horror; he brought up in himself his own views on what is happening around, not borrowed from anyone; he expressed these views in his story.

One of its themes is that, whatever the person, good or bad, who has received higher education or, conversely, uneducated; no matter what position he occupies, when he comprehends almost incurable disease, he ceases to be a high-ranking official, turns into ordinary person who just wants to live. Solzhenitsyn described life in a cancer ward, in the most terrible of hospitals, where people are doomed to death. Along with describing the struggle of a person for life, for the desire to simply coexist without pain, without torment, Solzhenitsyn, always and under any circumstances, distinguished by his craving for life, raised many problems. Their range is quite wide: from the meaning of life, the relationship between a man and a woman to the purpose of literature.

Solzhenitsyn pushes people together in one of the chambers different nationalities, professions committed to different ideas. One of these patients was Oleg Kostoglotov, an exile, a former convict, and the other was Rusanov, the exact opposite of Kostoglotov: a party leader, “a valuable worker, an honored person”, devoted to the party. Having shown the events of the story first through the eyes of Rusanov, and then through the perception of Kostoglotov, Solzhenitsyn made it clear that power would gradually change, that the Rusanovs with their “questionnaire economy”, with their methods of various warnings, would cease to exist and the Kostoglotovs would live, who did not accept such concepts as "remnants of bourgeois consciousness" and "social origin". Solzhenitsyn wrote the story, trying to show different views on life: both from the point of view of Bega, and from the point of view of Asya, Dema, Vadim and many others. In some ways, their views are similar, in some ways they differ. But basically Solzhenitsyn wants to show the wrongness of those who think like Rusanov's daughter, Rusanov himself. They are accustomed to looking for people somewhere necessarily below; think only of yourself, without thinking about others. Kostoglotov - the spokesman for Solzhenitsyn's ideas; through Oleg's disputes with the ward, through his conversations in the camps, he reveals the paradoxical nature of life, or rather, that there was no point in such a life, just as there is no point in the literature that Avieta extols. According to her, sincerity in literature is harmful. “Literature is to entertain us when we are in a bad mood,” says Avieta, not realizing that literature is really a teacher of life. And if you have to write about what should be, then it means that there will never be truth, since no one can say exactly what will happen. And not everyone can see and describe what is, and it is unlikely that Avieta will be able to imagine at least a hundredth of the horror when a woman ceases to be a woman, but becomes a workhorse, who subsequently cannot have children. Zoya reveals to Kostoglotov the whole horror of hormone therapy; and the fact that he is deprived of the right to continue himself horrifies him: “First they deprived me of my own life. Now they are also depriving them of the right to ... continue themselves. To whom and why will I now be? .. The worst of freaks! For mercy? .. For alms? .. ”And no matter how much Ephraim, Vadim, Rusanov argue about the meaning of life, no matter how much they talk about him, for everyone he will remain the same - leave someone behind him. Kostoglotov went through everything, and this left its mark on his system of values, on his concept of life.

That Solzhenitsyn for a long time spent in the camps, also influenced his language and style of writing the story. But the work only benefits from this, since everything that he writes about becomes available to a person, he is, as it were, transferred to a hospital and takes part in everything that happens. But it is unlikely that any of us will be able to fully understand Kostoglotov, who sees a prison everywhere, tries to find and finds a camp approach in everything, even in a zoo. The camp has crippled his life, and he understands that he is unlikely to be able to start his former life, that the road back is closed to him. And millions more of the same lost people were thrown into the vastness of the country, people who, communicating with those who did not touch the camp, understand that there will always be a wall of misunderstanding between them, just as Lyudmila Afanasyevna Kostoglotova did not understand.

We grieve that these people, who were crippled by life, disfigured by the regime, who showed such an irrepressible thirst for life, experienced terrible suffering, are now forced to endure the exclusion of society. They have to give up the life that they have long sought, that they deserve.

Analysis history
First of all, Lyudmila Afanasyevna took Kostoglotov to the control room, from where the patient had just left after the session. From eight in the morning, a large one hundred and eighty thousand-volt X-ray tube, hanging from a tripod on suspensions, worked almost continuously here, and the window was closed, and all the air was filled with a slightly sweet, slightly nasty X-ray heat.
This warming up, as his lungs felt (and it was not just a warming up), became disgusting to the patients after half a dozen, after a dozen sessions, while Lyudmila Afanasyevna got used to it. For twenty years of work here, when the tubes had no protection at all (it also fell under the wire high voltage, was almost killed), Dontsova breathed the air of x-ray rooms every day, and more hours than admissible, sat on diagnostics. And in spite of all the screens and gloves, she probably received more “eras” than the most patient and seriously ill patients, only no one counted these “eras”, did not add them up.
She was in a hurry - but not only to get out quickly, but it was impossible to delay the X-ray installation for extra minutes. She showed Kostoglotov to lie on a hard bed under the tube and open his stomach. With some kind of tickling cool brush she ran it over his skin, outlining something and as if writing out numbers.
And then she explained to the X-ray technician sister the scheme of quadrants and how to bring the tube to each quadrant. Then she ordered him to roll over on his stomach and smeared it on his back. Announced:
- After the session, come to me.
And she left. And the sister again ordered him with his stomach up and covered the first quadrant with sheets, then she began to wear heavy rugs made of leaded rubber and cover with them all adjacent places that should not now receive a direct hit of the x-ray. Flexible mats pleasantly-hardly fit the body.
The sister also left, closed the door, and now saw him only through a small window in the thick wall. There was a low hum, the auxiliary lamps lit up, the main tube glowed.
And through the left cell of the skin of the abdomen, and then through the layers and organs, which the owner himself did not know the names of, through the body of a tumor toad, through the stomach or intestines, through the blood going through the arteries and veins, through the lymph, through the cells, through the spine and small bones, and even through the layers, vessels and skin there, on the back, then through the flooring of the trestle bed, four-centimeter floor boards, through the logs, through the backfill and further, further, going into the very stone foundation or into the ground, hard X-rays poured, Shuddering vectors of electric and magnetic fields, inconceivable to the human mind, or more understandable projectiles-quanta, tearing and resolving everything that came across them on the way.
And this barbaric shooting with large quanta, which took place silently and imperceptibly for the tissues being shot, in twelve sessions returned to Kostoglotov the intention to live, and the taste of life, and appetite, and even a cheerful mood. From the second and third shots, having freed himself from the pains that made his existence unbearable, he reached out to find out and understand how these piercing projectiles can bomb a tumor and not touch the rest of the body. Kostoglotov could not fully succumb to treatment until he understood his ideas for himself and believed in it.
And he tried to ferret out the idea of ​​X-ray therapy from Vera Kornilievna, that sweet woman who disarmed his prejudice and alertness from the first meeting under the stairs, when he decided that even though the firemen and the police would pull him out, he would not leave with good will.
"Don't be afraid, explain," he reassured her. - I am like that conscious fighter who must understand the combat mission, otherwise he does not fight. How can it be that X-ray destroys the tumor, and does not touch the rest of the tissues?
All the feelings of Vera Kornilievna, even before the eyes, were expressed in her responsive light lips. And the hesitation was expressed in them.
(What could she tell him about this blind artillery, which with the same pleasure beats on its own, as well as on strangers?)
- Oh, it's not supposed to... Well, all right. X-ray, of course, destroys everything. Only normal tissues recover quickly, while tumor tissues do not.
Whether she told the truth or not, but Kostoglotov liked it.
- ABOUT! These are the conditions I play. Thank you. Now I will get better!
And, indeed, he recovered. He willingly lay down under an x-ray and during the session he especially inspired the tumor cells that they were being destroyed, that they were in trouble.
And then I thought about anything under the x-ray, even dozed off.
Now he looked around at many hanging hoses and wires and wanted to explain to himself why there are so many of them, and if there is cooling here, then water or oil. But his thoughts did not stop there, and he did not explain anything to himself.
He thought, it turns out, about Vera Gangart. He thought that such a nice woman would never appear in Ush-Terek. And all such women must be married. However, remembering this husband in brackets, he thought about her outside of this husband. He thought how pleasant it would be to chat with her not for a moment, but for a long, long time, if only to walk around the courtyard of the clinic. Sometimes to scare her with a harsh judgment - she is amusingly lost. Her grace shines in a smile every time like the sun, when she only comes across in the corridor to meet or enter the ward. She's not kind by profession, she's just kind. And lips...
The tube itched with a slight ringing.
He thought of Vera Gangart, but he also thought of Zoya. It turned out that the strongest impression from last night, which emerged in the morning, was from her unanimously matched breasts, which made up, as it were, a shelf, almost horizontal. During yesterday's chatter, a large and rather heavy ruler for drawing out statements lay on the table near them - not a plywood ruler, but from a planed board. And all evening Kostoglotov was tempted to take this ruler and put it on the shelf of her breasts - to check whether it would slip or not slip. It seemed to him that he would not slip.
He also thought with gratitude of that heavy leaden rug that was placed below his stomach. This rug pressed on him and joyfully confirmed: “I will protect, do not be afraid!”
Or maybe not? Maybe he's not fat enough? Or maybe it's not placed very neatly?
However, during these twelve days Kostoglotov not only returned to life - to food, movement and cheerful mood. During these twelve days he returned to the sensation, the reddest in life, but which he had completely lost in recent months in pain. And, therefore, lead held the defense!
Still, it was necessary to jump out of the clinic while intact.
He did not notice how the buzzing stopped, and the pink threads began to cool. A sister came in and began to take off his shields and sheets. He lowered his legs from the trestle bed and then clearly saw purple cells and numbers on his stomach.
- But how to wash?
- Only with the permission of doctors.
- Convenient device. So this is what they prepared for me for a month?
He went to Dontsova. She sat in the room of short-focus devices and looked at the gap of large X-ray films. Both devices were turned off, both windows were open, and there was no one else.
"Sit down," said Dontsova dryly.
He sat down.
She continued to compare the two X-rays.
Although Kostoglotov argued with her, all this was his defense against the excesses of medicine developed in the instructions. And Lyudmila Afanasyevna herself aroused his confidence - not only by masculine determination, clear commands in the darkness at the screen, and age, and unconditional devotion to one job, but most of all by the way she confidently felt the contour of the tumor from the first day and walked exactly, exactly along him. The correctness of the probe was told to him by the tumor itself, which also felt something. Only the patient can assess whether the doctor correctly understands the tumor with his fingers. Dontsova probed his tumor so much that she didn't even need an X-ray.
Putting aside the X-rays and taking off her glasses, she said:
- Kostoglotov. There is a significant gap in your medical history. We need to be sure of the nature of your primary tumor. - When Dontsova switched to medical speech, her manner of speaking accelerated very much: long phrases and terms slipped through in one breath. - What you are talking about the operation the year before last, and the position of the current metastasis converge to our diagnosis. However, other possibilities are not excluded. And this makes it difficult for us to heal. It is impossible to take a sample from your metastasis now, as you understand.
- God bless. I would not give.
- I still don't understand why we can't get glasses with the primary drug. You yourself are quite sure that the histological analysis was?
- Yes I am sure.
- But why in this case you were not announced the result? she scribbled in a businesslike patter. Some words had to be guessed.
But Kostoglotov lost the habit of rushing:
- Result? We had such turbulent events, Lyudmila Afanasyevna, such a situation that, honestly ... It was simply embarrassing to ask about my biopsy. Here heads flew. Yes, I did not understand why the biopsy. - Kostoglotov liked to use their terms when talking with doctors.
You didn't understand, of course. But the doctors should have understood that they are not playing with this.
- Doctors?
He looked at the gray hair, which she did not hide or paint over, embraced the collected business expression of her somewhat high-cheeked face.
How life goes, that his compatriot, contemporary and well-wisher is sitting in front of him - and in their common native Russian language, he cannot explain to her the simplest things. You have to start too far away, or something. Or cut off too soon.
- And the doctors, Lyudmila Afanasievna, could not do anything. The first surgeon, a Ukrainian, who appointed me an operation and prepared me for it, was taken to the stage on the very night of the operation.
- And what?
- Like what? Taken away.
- But let me, when he was warned, he could ...
Kostoglotov laughed more frankly.
- No one warns about the stage, Lyudmila Afanasyevna. That's the point, to pull a person out of the blue.
Dontsova frowned her large forehead. Kostoglotov was talking nonsense.
- But if he had an operating patient? ..
- Ha! They brought me even cleaner. One Lithuanian swallowed an aluminum spoon, a tablespoon.
- How can it be?!
- On purpose. To get out of loneliness. He did not know that the surgeon was being taken away.
- Well, and ... then? Was your tumor growing rapidly?
- Yes, really from morning to evening, seriously ... Then, five days later, another surgeon, a German, Karl Fedorovich, was brought from another camp. In-from ... Well, he looked around at the new place and a day later he performed an operation on me. But none of these words: "malignant tumor", "metastases" - no one told me. I didn't know them.
- But he sent the biopsy?
- I didn't know anything then, no biopsy. I was lying after the operation, I was wearing sandbags. By the end of the week, he began to learn to lower his leg from the bed, to stand - suddenly they collect another stage from the camp, about seven hundred people, called "rebels". And my most humble Karl Fedorovich falls into this stage. They took him from the residential barracks, they did not let him go around the sick last time.
- What wildness!
- Yes, this is not wildness. - Kostoglotov perked up more than usual. - My friend came running, whispered that I was also on the list for that stage, the head of the medical unit, Madame Dubinskaya, agreed. She agreed, knowing that I couldn’t walk, that my stitches had not been removed, what a bastard! .. Excuse me ... Well, I firmly decided: to ride in calf cars with stitches not removed - it will fester, it’s death. Now they will come for me, I will say: shoot here, on the bunk, I will not go anywhere. Firmly! But they didn't come for me. Not because Madame Dubinskaya had mercy, she was still surprised that I was not sent. And figured out the accounting and distribution part: I had time less than a year. But I digress ... So I went to the window and look. Behind the fence of the hospital there is a ruler, about twenty meters from me, and those who are already ready with things are driven to the stage on it. From there, Karl Fyodorovich saw me in the window and shouted: “Kostoglotov! Open the window!" He was under supervision: "Shut up, you bastard!" And he: “Kostoglotov! Remember! It is very important! I sent a section of your tumor for histological analysis to Omsk, to the Department of Pathology, remember!” Well... they stole them. Here are my doctors, your predecessors. What are they guilty of?
Kostoglotov leaned back in his chair. He got excited. He was engulfed in the air of that hospital, not this one.
Selecting the necessary from the superfluous (in the stories of patients there is always a lot of superfluous), Dontsova led her own:
- Well, what about the answer from Omsk? Was? Have you been announced?
Kostoglotov shrugged his sharp-angled shoulders.
- Nobody announced anything. I did not understand why Karl Fedorovich shouted this to me. Only last autumn, when I was in exile, when I was already very tired, one old gynecologist, my friend, began to insist that I ask. I wrote to my camp. There was no answer. Then he wrote a complaint to the camp management. Two months later, the answer came like this: "After a thorough check of your archival file, it is not possible to establish an analysis." I was already getting so sick of the tumor that I would have abandoned this correspondence, but since the commandant’s office would not let me go to treatment anyway, I wrote at random to Omsk, to the department of pathology. And from there, quickly, in a few days, the answer came - already in January, before they let me out here.
- Well, here it is! This answer! Where is he?!
- Lyudmila Afanasievna, I left here - I have ... Everything is indifferent. Yes, and a piece of paper without a seal, without a stamp, it's just a letter from the laboratory assistant of the department. She kindly writes that it was precisely from the date that I am naming that the drug was received from that village, and the analysis was done and confirmed that ... the type of tumor you suspected. And that at the same time the answer was sent to the requesting hospital, that is, our camp hospital. And this is very similar to the order there, I fully believe: the answer came, no one needed it, and Madame Dubinskaya ...
No, Dontsova absolutely did not understand such logic! Her arms were crossed, and she impatiently clapped her handfuls above her elbows.
- Why, from such an answer it followed that you immediately needed x-ray therapy!
- Whom? - Kostoglotov playfully screwed up his eyes and looked at Lyudmila Afanasievna. - X-ray therapy?
Well, he told her for a quarter of an hour - and what did he say? She didn't understand anything again.
- Lyudmila Afanasievna! he called. - No, in order to imagine the world there ... Well, the idea of ​​​​it is not at all common! What radiotherapy! My pain still didn’t go away at the site of the operation, like Akhmadjan’s now, and I was already at general work and pouring concrete. And I did not think that I could be dissatisfied with something. Do you know how much a deep box of liquid concrete weighs if it is lifted by two people?
She lowered her head.
- Well, let. But now this answer from the department of pathology - why is it without a seal? Why is it a private letter?
- Thank you for even a private letter! - persuaded Kostoglotov. - Got a good man. Still, there are more good people among women than among men, I notice ... And a private letter - because of our damned secrecy! She writes further: however, the preparation of the tumor was sent to us without a name, without indicating the name of the patient. Therefore, we cannot give you an official certificate and we cannot send you glass of the preparation either. - Kostoglotov began to get annoyed. This expression took over his face faster than the others. - Great state secret! Idiots! They are shaking that in some pulpit they find out that in some camp a certain prisoner Kostoglotov is languishing. Brother Louis! Now the anonymous letter will lie there, and you will puzzle over how to treat me. But the secret!
Dontsova looked firmly and clearly. She didn't leave hers.
- Well, I must include this letter in the medical history.
- Fine. I will return to my aul - and immediately send it to you.
- No, you have to hurry. This your gynecologist will not find, will not send?
- Yes, he will find something ... And when will I go myself? - Kostoglotov looked frowningly.
- You will go then, - Dontsova weighed with great significance, - when I deem it necessary to interrupt your treatment. And then for a while.
Kostoglotov was waiting for this moment in conversation! It was impossible to miss him without a fight!
- Lyudmila Afanasievna! How would we establish not this tone of an adult with a child, but an adult with an adult? Seriously. I'm on your way today...
- You are on my rounds today, - Dontsova's large face threatened, - staged a shameful scene. What would you like? - excite the sick? What are you putting into their heads?
- What did I want? - He spoke without getting excited, also with meaning, and he held the chair firmly, with his back against the back. “I just wanted to remind you of your right to control your life. Man - can dispose of his life, no? Do you grant me such a right?
Dontsova looked at his colorless sinuous scar and was silent. Kostoglotov developed:
- You immediately proceed from the wrong position: since the patient has come to you, then you think for him. Further, your instructions, your five minutes, the program, the plan and the honor of your medical institution think for him. And again I am a grain of sand, as in a camp, again nothing depends on me.
“The clinic takes written consent from patients before the operation,” Dontsova reminded.
(Why is she talking about the operation? .. He’s going to the operation for nothing!)
- Thank you! Thanks for that, even though she does it for her own safety. But apart from the operation, you don’t ask the patient about anything, you don’t explain anything to him! After all, what is one x-ray worth!
- About x-rays - where did you get the rumors? Dontsova guessed. - Isn't it from Rabinovich?
- I don't know any Rabinovich! Kostoglotov shook his head confidently. - I'm talking about the principle.
(Yes, it was from Rabinovich that he heard these gloomy stories about the consequences of X-rays, but promised not to give it away. Rabinovich was an outpatient who had already received two hundred and something sessions, who could hardly endure them and, as he felt, was approaching with every ten, not to where he lived - in an apartment, in a house, in the city, no one understood him: healthy people, they ran from morning to evening and thought about some successes and failures that seemed very significant to them. Even his own family was already tired of him. Only here, on the porch of the anti-cancer dispensary, the patients listened to him for hours and sympathized. They understood what it meant when the movable triangle of the "arm" ossified and X-ray scars thickened at all radiation sites.)
Tell me, he was talking about the principle!.. Only Dontsova and her residents were not enough to spend days in interviews with patients about the principles of treatment! When would then and treat!
But such a meticulous, inquisitive stubborn one, like this one, or like Rabinovich, who tormented her with clarifications about the course of the disease, came across fifty patients alone, and it was inevitable to sometimes have a hard lot to explain to them. The case with Kostoglotov was special and medical: special in that careless, as if conspiratorially malicious management of the disease before it, when he was admitted, pushed to the very death line - and special in that steep, exceptionally quick recovery, which under X-rays it started.
- Kostoglotov! In twelve sessions, X-rays made you a living person from a dead man - and how dare you put your hand on an X-ray? You complain that you were not treated in the camp and exile, you were neglected - and then you complain that you are being treated and worried about you. Where is the logic?
- It turns out that there is no logic, - Kostoglotov shook his black curls. - But maybe it shouldn't exist, Lyudmila Afanasyevna? After all, man is a very complex being, why should he be explained by logic? Or is it the economy? or physiology? Yes, I came to you as a dead man, and asked to come to you, and lay on the floor near the stairs - and now you draw the logical conclusion that I came to you to save myself at any cost. And I do not want - at any cost!! There is nothing in the world for which I would agree to pay any price! - He began to rush, as he did not like, but Dontsova tended to interrupt him, and there was still a lot to say. - I came to you for relief of suffering! I said: it hurts me a lot, help! And you helped! And it doesn't hurt me. Thank you! Thank you! I am your grateful debtor. Only now - let me go! Let me, like a dog, go to my kennel and lie down and lick off there.
- And when you are propped up again - will you crawl to us again?
- May be. Maybe I'll come back again.
- And we will have to accept you?
- Yes!! And in this I see your mercy! And what worries you? - percentage of recovery? reporting? How do you record that you let me go after fifteen sessions when the Academy of Medical Sciences recommends at least sixty?
She had never heard such inconsistent nonsense. Just from the point of view of reporting, it was very profitable to write him out now with a “dramatic improvement”, but after fifty sessions this will not happen.
And he talks all his own:
- It's enough for me that you've got the tumor back. And they stopped. She is on the defensive. And I'm on the defensive. Wonderful. A soldier lives best on the defensive. And you still won’t be able to cure “to the end”, because there is no end to cancer treatment. And in general, all processes of nature are characterized by asymptotic saturation, when big efforts lead to small results. At first, my tumor collapsed quickly, now it will go slowly - so let me go with the remnants of my blood.
- Where did you get this information, I wonder? Dontsova frowned.
- And I, you know, from childhood loved to read medical books.
- But what exactly are you afraid of in our treatment?
- What should I be afraid of - I don't know, Lyudmila Afanasievna, I'm not a doctor. Maybe you know this, but you don't want to explain it to me. For example. Vera Kornilievna wants me to inject glucose...
- Necessarily.
- But I do not want.
- Yes, why?
- First of all, it's unnatural. If I really need grape sugar - so give it to me in my mouth! What did they come up with in the twentieth century: every medicine is an injection? Where is it seen in nature? in animals? A hundred years will pass - they will laugh at us as savages. And then - how do they prick? One sister will hit right away, and the other will run out of this whole... elbow bend. Don't want! Then I see you approaching me for a blood transfusion...
- You should rejoice! Someone is giving you their blood! This is health, this is life!
- But I do not want! One Chechen was poured here in my presence, then he was thrown up in bed for three hours, they say: "incomplete combination." And someone was injected with blood past a vein, a bump on his arm jumped up. Now compresses and soar for a whole month. But I do not want.
- But without a blood transfusion, you can not give a lot of x-rays.
- So do not give! Why do you even take the right to decide for another person? After all, this is a terrible right, it rarely leads to good. Be afraid of him! It is not given to the doctor.
- It is given to the doctor! First of all - to him! Dontsova screamed with conviction, already very angry. - And without this right there would be no medicine!
- And what does it lead to? You'll be making a report on radiation sickness soon, right?
- How do you know? - Lyudmila Afanasyevna was amazed.
Yes, it's easy to guess...
(There was just a thick folder with typewritten sheets lying on the table. The inscription on the folder fell to Kostoglotov upside down, but during the conversation he read it and thought it over.)
- ... easy to guess. Because a new name has appeared and, therefore, it is necessary to make reports. But after all, even twenty years ago you irradiated some such Kostoglotov, who fought back that he was afraid of treatment, and you assured that everything was in order, because you had not yet known radiation sickness. So am I now: I still don’t know what I should be afraid of, but let me go! I want to recover on my own. All of a sudden, I'll feel better, huh?
Doctors have a truth: the patient should not be frightened, the patient should be encouraged. But such an annoying patient as Kostoglotov, on the contrary, had to be stunned.
- Better? It won't! I can assure you, - she slapped the table with four fingers like a fly cracker, - she won't! You, - she still measured the blow, - will die!
And watched him flinch. But he just went quiet.
- You will have the fate of Azovkin. Seen, right? After all, you and him have the same disease and neglect is almost the same. We are saving Akhmadzhan because he was irradiated immediately after the operation. And you have lost two years, you think about it! And it was necessary to immediately do the second operation - the nearest lymph node along the route, but you missed it, mind you. And metastases flowed! Your tumor is one of the most dangerous types of cancer! It is dangerous because it is transient and sharply malignant, that is, it metastasizes very quickly. Its mortality rate was ninety-five percent just recently, is that fine with you? Here, I'll show you...
She pulled a folder out of the pile and began to rummage through it. Kostoglotov was silent. Then he spoke, but quietly, not at all as confidently as before:
“To be honest, I don’t care much for life. Not only I don’t have it in front, but I didn’t have it in the back either. And if I looked through to live half a year - I have to live them. And I don’t want to plan for ten or twenty years. Too much treatment is too much pain. X-ray nausea, vomiting will begin - why? ..
- Found it! Here! These are our statistics. - And she turned to him a double notebook sheet. The name of his tumor went across the entire unfolded sheet, and then above the left side: “Already dead”, above the right: “Still alive.” And the names were written in three columns - at different times, in pencils, ink. There were no blots on the left side, but on the right - deletions, deletions, deletions ... - So. When we check out, we write everyone down on the right list, and then transfer them to the left. But still there are lucky ones who remain in the right, you see?
She let him look at the list and think.
- It seems to you that you have recovered! - again began energetically. - You are as sick as you were. As they came to us, so they remained. The only thing that turned out is that you can fight your tumor! That is not yet dead. And at that moment you declare that you will leave? Well, go away! Go away! Sign up today! I will now give an order ... And I myself will put you on this list. Not dead yet.
He was silent.
- A? Decide!
“Lyudmila Afanasyevna,” Kostoglotov put forward conciliatoryly. - Well, if you need some reasonable number of sessions - five, ten ...
- Not five and not ten! No one! Or - as many as you need! For example, with today- two sessions, not one. And all the treatments you need! And stop smoking! And another obligatory condition: to endure the treatment not only with faith, but also with joy! With joy! Only then will you be cured!
He lowered his head. In part, today he was bargaining with a request. He was afraid that he would not be offered an operation - but they did not offer it. And you can still get irradiated, nothing. In reserve, Kostoglotov had a secret medicine - the Issyk-Kul root, and he expected to go to his wilderness not just, but to be treated with a root. Having a root, he actually came to this cancer dispensary only for a test.
And Dr. Dontsova, seeing that she had won, said magnanimously:
- Okay, I won't give you glucose. Instead of it - another injection, intramuscular.
Kostoglotov smiled.
- Well, I give it to you.
- And please: speed up the forwarding of the Omsk letter.
He walked away from her and thought that he was walking between two eternities. On the one hand - a list of those doomed to die. On the other hand, the eternal link. Eternal like the stars. Like galaxies.

Initially, the novel was planned to be published in the magazine " New world in the mid-1960s. However, in those years the book was never officially published in the Soviet Union. A little later, the novel began to be printed in samizdat and distributed throughout the USSR. In addition, the book was published in other countries in Russian and in translations. The novel became one of the greatest literary successes of A. Solzhenitsyn. The work becomes the basis for awarding the Nobel Prize to the author. In 1990, the novel was officially published in the Soviet Union in the Novy Mir magazine.

The action takes place in a hospital at the clinic of the Tashkent Medical Institute (TashMi). The thirteenth ("cancer") building gathered people afflicted with one of the most terrible diseases, undefeated by mankind to the end. With nothing else to do, the patients spend their time arguing about ideology, life and death. Each inhabitant of the gloomy building has its own fate and its own way out of this terrible place: some are discharged home to die, others with improvement, and others are transferred to other departments.

Character characteristics

Oleg Kostoglotov

The protagonist of the novel is a former front-line soldier. Kostoglotov (or, as his comrades in misfortune call him, Ogloyed) went to prison, and then was sentenced to eternal exile in Kazakhstan. Kostoglotov does not consider himself dying. He does not trust "scientific" medicine, preferring to folk remedies. Ogloyed is 34 years old. Once he dreamed of becoming an officer and getting a higher education. However, none of his wishes came true. He was not accepted as an officer, and he will no longer enter the institute, as he considers himself too old to study. Kostoglotov likes doctor Vera Gangart (Vega) and nurse Zoya. The stinger is full of desire to live and take everything from life.

Informer Rusanov

Before getting to the hospital, the patient named Rusanov held a "responsible" position. He was an adherent of the Stalinist system and made more than one denunciation in his life. Rusanov, like Ogloyed, does not intend to die. He dreams of a decent pension, which he deserves with his hard "work". The former informer does not like the hospital he ended up in. Such a person, Rusanov believes, should be treated in best conditions.

Dyomka is one of the youngest patients in the ward. The boy has gone through a lot in his 16 years. His parents broke up because his mother "got pissed off". There was no one to take care of Dyomka's upbringing. He became an orphan with living parents. The boy dreamed of getting on his own feet, getting a higher education. The only joy in Demka's life was football. But it was his favorite sport that took away his health. After hitting the leg with a ball, the boy developed cancer. The leg had to be amputated.

But even this could not break the orphan. Dyomka continues to dream of higher education. He perceives the loss of a leg as a blessing. After all, now he does not have to waste time on sports and dance floors. The state will pay the boy a lifetime pension, which means that he will be able to study and become a writer. Dyomka met his first love, Asenka, in the hospital. But both Asenka and Dyomka understand that this feeling will not continue beyond the walls of the "cancer" building. The girl's chest was amputated, and life lost all meaning for her.

Efrem Podduvaev

Ephraim worked as a builder. Once a terrible disease has already "released" him. Podduvaev is sure that this time everything will work out. Shortly before his death, he read a book by Leo Tolstoy, which made him think about many things. Ephraim is discharged from the hospital. After a while he was gone.

Vadim Zatsyrko

The thirst for life is also great in the geologist Vadim Zatsyrko. Vadim was always afraid of only one thing - inaction. And now he's been in the hospital for a month. Zatsyrko is 27 years old. He is too young to die. At first, the geologist tries to ignore death while continuing to work on a method for determining the presence of ores from radioactive water. Then self-confidence begins to gradually leave him.

Alexey Shulubin

Librarian Shulubin managed to tell a lot in his life. In 1917 he became a Bolshevik, then participated in civil war. He had no friends, his wife died. Shulubin had children, but they had long forgotten about his existence. The illness became for the librarian the last step towards loneliness. Shulubin doesn't like talking. He is much more interested in listening.

Character prototypes

Some of the characters in the novel had prototypes. The prototype of the doctor Lyudmila Dontsova was Lidia Dunaeva, head of the radiation department. The author called the treating doctor Irina Meike in his novel Vera Gangart.

The "cancer" corps united a huge number of different people with dissimilar destinies. Perhaps they would never have met outside the walls of this hospital. But then something appeared that united them - a disease, which is not always cured even in the progressive twentieth century.

Cancer made people equal different ages with different social status. The disease behaves in the same way both with Rusanov, who holds a high post, and with the former prisoner Ogloyed. Cancer does not spare those who were already offended by fate. Left without parental care, Dyomka loses his leg. The librarian Shulubin, forgotten by his relatives, does not expect a happy old age. The disease relieves society of the old and infirm, useless people. But why then does she take away the young, beautiful, full of life and plans for the future? Why should a young geologist leave this world before reaching the age of thirty, without having time to give humanity what he wanted? Questions remain unanswered.

Only when they were away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, the inhabitants of the "cancer" corps finally got the opportunity to think about the meaning of life. All their lives, these people have been striving for something: they dreamed of higher education, of family happiness, of having time to create something. Some patients, such as Rusanov, were not very picky about how they would achieve their goals. But the moment came when all the successes, achievements, sorrows and joys ceased to have any meaning. On the threshold of death, the tinsel of being loses its brilliance. And only then the person understands that the main thing in his life was life itself.

The novel contrasts 2 methods of cancer treatment: scientific, in which Dr. Dontsova unconditionally believes, and folk, which Kostoglotov prefers. IN post-revolutionary years the confrontation between official and traditional medicine became especially aggravated. Oddly enough, but even by the middle of the century, the doctor's prescriptions could not overcome the "grandmother's" recipes. Flights into space and scientific and technological progress have not crushed the faith of many people in healers' prayers.

The secret of traditional medicine is that it does not treat the disease, but the patient, while official, "scientific" medicine is strenuously trying to influence the disease. The treatment suggested by the doctor kills the cancer cells while also killing the person himself. Having got rid of cancer, the patient gets new health problems. Traditional medicine invites people to return to nature and to themselves, to believe in their own strength, capable of giving greater healing than any modern medicine.

A lesson on the work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn on the topic “Cancer Ward”: the history of creation, issues, heroes” is held in the 10th grade after studying the novel by Leo Tolstoy "War and Peace".

For students of the 10th grade, it is important not only to read the book plot, but also to pay attention to details. The story of AI Solzhenitsyn is considered both in the ideological and political context. Attention is also drawn to the amazing language of the writer's works: precise, poetic, ironic, deeply Russian. The result is a written work “What, in your opinion, is the meaning of human life?”, Offering to think about this issue together with L.N. Tolstoy and A.I. Solzhenitsyn.

municipal budgetary educational institution

“Order of the Badge of Honor” gymnasium No. 2 named after I.P. Pavlova"

Lesson in grade 10 on the topic:

"A. I. Solzhenitsyn's story "Cancer Ward": history of creation, problems, heroes."

Prepared by the teacher of Russian language and literature Belova Irina Fedorovna

Ryazan, 2016

Subject: "A. I. Solzhenitsyn's story "Cancer Ward": history of creation, problems, heroes."

Lesson design : portrait of AI Solzhenitsyn, reviews of the writer, exhibition of books, newspaper publications.

Lesson Objectives : arouse interest in the personality and work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn; tell about the history of the creation of the story "Cancer Ward"; introduce the theme of the story and its characters.

During the classes

The word of the teacher about the history of the creation of the work.

Who is he, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn?

There have always been people in Russia who could not be silent when silence was the only way to survive. One of these people is Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, an outstanding Russian writer, publicist and public figure.

The Russian reader learned about him in the early sixties, after the publication of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the Novy Mir magazine.

special literary education A. I. Solzhenitsyn did not receive, but the last two pre-war years he studied at the philological faculty of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy and Literature. He was drafted into the army, graduated from the artillery school. Shortly before the end of the war, in February 1945, in East Prussia, Captain A.I. Solzhenitsyn was already accused under a political article, arrested, and then - a prison and a camp.
The camp term ended on the day of Stalin's death, and cancer was immediately discovered; according to the verdict of doctors, he had less than a month to live. It was a terrible moment in the writer's life. In the proximity of death, in anticipation of his fate, AI Solzhenitsyn saw the possibility of posing the most important, final questions of human existence. First of all, about the meaning of life. The disease does not take into account social status, it is indifferent to ideological beliefs, it is terrible because of its suddenness and the fact that it makes everyone equal before death. But A. I. Solzhenitsyn did not die, despite the advanced malignant tumor, and believed that “the life returned to him since then has an embedded purpose.”

In 1955, on the day he was discharged from the cancer ward, in Tashkent, Solzhenitsyn conceived the story "The Cancer Ward". “However, the idea lay without any movement until January 1963, when the story was begun, but even here it was pushed aside by the start of work on The Red Wheel. In 1964, the author made a trip to the Tashkent Oncology Center to meet with his former attending physicians and to clarify some medical circumstances. Since the autumn of 1965, after the arrest of the author's archive, when the materials of the "Archipelago" were being finalized in the Shelter, in places of open life it was only possible to continue this story.

I would like to note that the Cancer Ward is one of the major works A.I. Solzhenitsyn of the Ryazan period. The Ryazan stage of the life and work of A.I. Solzhenitsyn is called "Boldino autumn". Here he writes or begins to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1959), Matrenin Dvor (1959), Cancer Ward (1966), In the First Circle (1958), For the Good of the Cause (1963), "The Gulag Archipelago" (1968), "The Red Wheel (August the Fourteenth)" (1969). It was in Ryazan that fame would come to Solzhenitsyn after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. Atmosphere ancient city, his people, Meshchera landscapes influenced

every work written here. As mentioned earlier, Solzhenitsyn came up with the idea of ​​the Cancer Ward back in 1955, after being discharged from the Tashkent hospital. He returns to him on February 3, 1963. “Alexander Isaevich suddenly felt an irresistible desire to write a story from his “oncological past”. In the evening, when we skied around the square, he was already in his “cancer ward,” writes N.A. Reshetovskaya, the first wife of the writer. This happens at a moment impossible for Solzhenitsyn's entire previous life, when he is at the pinnacle of fame, recognition and good fortune.

In the late spring of 1963, A.I. Solzhenitsyn leaves for Solotcha to prepare for writing a story from his “oncological past”. Preparing and tuning in, he reads L.N. Tolstoy is the very tenth volume, which his heroes will then discuss.

In the spring of 1966, part 1 was completed, proposed to Novy Mir, rejected by it, and sent by the author to Samizdat. During 1966, the 2nd part was also completed, with the same fate.

In the autumn of that year, a discussion of the 1st part took place in the prose section of the Moscow branch of the Writers' Union, and this was the upper limit of the achieved legality. In the autumn of 1967, Novy Mir legalized the acceptance of the story for publication, but could do nothing further. The first editions of the story were published in 1968 in Paris and Frankfurt.

A brief retelling of the story "Cancer Ward", the problems of the work. (Student's message).

The story "The Cancer Ward" reflects A.I. Solzhenitsyn's impressions of his stay in the Tashkent Oncological Dispensary and the history of his healing.

Solzhenitsyn wrote a story about people on the verge of death, about their final thoughts, actions. The time of action is limited to a few weeks, the place of action is the walls of the hospital. One of its themes is that no matter what a person is, good or bad, educated or, conversely, uneducated; no matter what position he holds, when an almost incurable disease befalls him, he ceases to be a high-ranking official, turns into an ordinary person who just wants to live. Solzhenitsyn described life in a cancer ward, in the most terrible of hospitals, where people are doomed to death. Along with describing the struggle of a person for life, for the desire to simply coexist without pain, without torment, Solzhenitsyn, always and under any circumstances, distinguished by his craving for life, raised many problems. Their range is quite wide: from the meaning of life, the relationship between a man and a woman to the purpose of literature.

Heroes and their prototypes. (Teacher's word)

So, the action of the novel basically takes place in the thirteenth (“cancer”) building of a dirty and overcrowded hospital at the clinic. Solzhenitsyn shows disputes, clashes in matters of ideology, the struggle with illness, with death, the inner world of the inhabitants of the chamber: the protagonist of Leningrad Oleg Kostoglotov, a front-line soldier, a former convict sentenced to eternal life; head of the personnel department Pavel Rusanov - scammer; a schoolboy, an orphan Dyomka, who dreams of getting a higher education; a young scientist-geologist Vadim Zatsyrko, on the verge of death, working on a method for determining the presence of ores by radioactive waters; the librarian of the agricultural technical school Alexei Shulubin, a former scientist in Russian biology; builder Ephraim Podduev, who read a book on the verge of death and thought about his own morality.

Some of the characters in the story have real prototypes:

Lyudmila Afanasievna Dontsova ("mother") - head of the radiation department Lidia Aleksandrovna Dunaeva;

Vera Kornilievna Gangart - treating doctor Irina Emelyanovna Meike;

Krementsov - old man Krementsov, academician Pavlov's beard (chapter 17);

Elizaveta Anatolyevna (Chapter 34) - Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya.

Checking knowledge of the text of the story .

Find out the hero of the story "Cancer Ward":

“You won’t be happy with such a neighborhood: he had a gangster face. This is how he looked, probably from the scar (the scar began near the corner of the mouth and passed along the bottom of the left cheek almost to the neck); or maybe from uncombed prickly black hair sticking up and up and to the side; or maybe even from a rude harsh expression.(Kostoglotov through the eyes of Rusanov)

“He obviously listened to his voice and at every gesture and turn he obviously saw himself from the outside - what a solid, authoritative, educated and clever man. In his native village, legends were made about him, he was known in the city, and even in the newspaper he was sometimes mentioned.(Nizamutdin Bakhramovich, head physician)

“He was quite healthy - he didn’t complain about anything in the ward, had no external lesion, his cheeks were filled with healthy swarthyness, and a smooth forelock was laid out on his forehead. He was a guy at least where, at least for dancing ". (Proshka)

“Clumsy, with an uncombed coal head, big hands almost did not fit into the side small pockets of a hospital jacket”. (Kostoglotov)

« He was strong in the shoulders, firm in the legs and of sound mind. He was not only two-wire, but two-core, and after eight hours he could work another eight as the first shift.(Efrem Podduev)

“Short and very slender - it seemed very slender because she emphasized narrow convergence in the waist interception. Her hair, unfashionably put in a knot at the back of her head, was lighter than black, but also darker than dark blond - those in which we are offered the unintelligible word "brown hair", but to say: black blond - between black and blond.(Dr. Gangart)

5. Conversation on the text.

What central question, the answer to which all the heroes of the work are looking for?

(It is formulated by the title of Leo Tolstoy's story, which accidentally fell into the hands of one of the patients, Efrem Podduev: "How does a person live?").

What are the central characters of the story arguing about - Oleg Kostoglotov and Pavel Rusanov? What conclusions does A.I. Solzhenitsyn lead the reader to?

(Having shown the events of the story, first through the eyes of Rusanov, and then through the perception of Kostoglotov, Solzhenitsyn made it clear that power would gradually change, that the Rusanovs with their “questionnaire economy”, with their methods of various warnings, would cease to exist, and the Kostoglotovs, who did not accept such concepts, would live as "remnants of bourgeois consciousness" and "social origin").

Who in the story is the spokesman for the ideas of A.I. Solzhenitsyn? (Oleg Kostoglotov).

Solzhenitsyn tried to show the different views of his heroes on life. What are their life principles?

(To the question “How does a person live?” Each hero of the story answers according to his convictions, principles, upbringing, life experience. For example, the Soviet nomenklatura worker and informer Rusanov is sure that “people live: by ideology and the public good.” But he learned a long time ago, and even thinks little about its meaning. And the geologist Vadim Zatsyrko claims that a person is alive with creativity. He would like to do a lot in life, complete his large and significant research, and carry out more and more new projects).

The heroes see the meaning of life in everything: in love, in salary, in qualifications, in their native places and in God. This question is answered not only by patients of the cancer corps, but also by oncologists who are fighting for the lives of patients, who face death every day. Give examples.

(About Gangart Vera: “She so wanted to be killed too now! She immediately, leaving the institute, wanted to go to the front. They didn’t take her ... And she had to live. That was all she had: to treat, sick. In that was the salvation."

In the last third of the story, a hero appears who deserves special attention - Shulubin. A conversation with Shulubin makes Oleg Kostoglotov think. With traitors, sycophants, opportunists, informers and the like, everything is obvious and does not need any explanation. But Shulubin's life truth shows Kosoglotov a different position. What is this position?

(Shulubin never denounced anyone, did not scoff, did not grovel before the authorities, but nevertheless he never tried to oppose himself to it. Shulubin's position in fact is always the position of the majority. Fear for oneself, for one's family, and finally, fear of remaining alone, "outside the collective" silenced millions).

Guys, what do you think, how does a person live?

6. Generalization.

The story "Cancer Ward" is one of the most important works of A.I. Solzhenitsyn of the Ryazan period. The author puts in it eternal problems the meaning of life, love and death, the morality of the existing system, reveals the sources of the material and spiritual poverty of the post-Stalinist society, reveals whether correction is possible and at what cost it is obtained. The author sees the potential possibility of curing the cancerous tumor of the Soviet society in the dialogues-disputes.

6. Homework:

Write an essay on the topic “What do you think is the meaning of human life?”