A review by shostakovichtchaikovsky
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nicholas Bethell, David Burg

5.0

What can I even say? This book took me far too long to read because I just wanted to absorb every word. The smallest moments, to me, were the most significant and they were what really started to turn on the waterworks (the violets, the blinded monkey, the postcards, the Kadmins' two dogs). Don't ask me why but (spoilers??) when Oleg goes to see the new Armenian kommendatura and is greeted with kindness, that completely set me off. Those little moments just created this acute sense of melancholy that completely overwhelmed me. Each and every character was so complex and I was intrigued about all of their lives- the overall atmosphere was so vivid.
Hopefully I will be able to read it in Russian one day and understand the little nuances!