POV: Solzhenitsyn also thought cancer had emotional roots (new book review).

I have finally finished my latest book, and this time it was from the ‘fiction’ section. !!

Personally, I have always found that well-written fiction by great intellects of history sometimes has more to teach me than any other genre of writing. This is because great writers put their incredible knowledge about humanity into their characters and plots. This might be why I sometimes quote Shakespeare to my clients, because he certainly knew a lot about humanity. 

However I had never read any Solzhenitsyn before. (It’s pronounced sol-shuh-neets-un). I knew a bit about his status as a Soviet dissident, imprisoned in a brutal gulag for 8 years after criticising Stalin in a letter, then sent into internal exile. 

I didn’t know much about internal exiles in Soviet history, but there’s plenty to explain this in the novel. It helps to understand that very few people had freedom of movement within the USSR. What I didn’t know is that often married couples came out of their respective prison camps only to find that their exiles had been arranged in different areas of the country, so they often never saw each other again. 

One thing I didn’t know about Solzhenitsyn is that he had cancer twice, and treated himself holistically, pretty successfully. 

The novel is set, as it would seem from the title, in a cancer ward in a Soviet provincial town, and we follow the lives of several different patients and doctors in their own limited existence under the brutal Marxist regime. It’s never clear whether the patients are allowed to refuse their devastating treatments or whether everything is compulsory. It is most certainly clear that often the wrong or too much of the correct treatment is given, destroying lives and health well into the future. 

The doctors are also trapped, and one poignant turn of events sees a female doctor develop her own stomach cancer after years of radiation exposure in the clinic (and also after a devastating upset in relation to her son, leaving her feeling powerless: it all starts to get a bit overwhelming for the astute reader when it is pointed out that this sort of emotional background to stomach cancer is exactly what the Root Cause Institute teaches). She has genuine horror at becoming ‘one of them’ as her own body deteriorates.

The food is poor. The ward is noisy. The doctors are full of pride and don’t like being questioned. A bit of snogging goes on between one of the patients and a female doctor. Two separate doctors invite a discharged patient to stay the night in their own homes when there’s going to be a paperwork problem with the authorities upon release. It certainly is a modern safeguarding nightmare! One of the patients is a Soviet official whose greatest career success was reporting a flatmate and his wife to the authorities. His self-jusftifying and self-aggrandising tendencies are beautifully studied. 

The patient we follow the most is a self-portrait for Solzhenitsyn, Oleg Kostoglotov, a former gulag prisoner, now in exile and shipped in to the town for cancer treatment. He is the one who questions the treatments, knows there are alternatives available (and indeed, the one he opts for and almost manages to smuggle into the clinic is the mandrake root concoction Solzhenitsyn himself used to reverse his first cancer), and also knows there is an emotional and spiritual component. Check out this extended quotation:

 ‘All I mean is that we shouldn’t behave like rabbits and put our complete trust in doctors. For instance, I’m reading this book.’ He picked up a large, open book from the window-sill. ‘Abrikosov and Stryukov, Pathological Anatomy, medical school text-book. It says here that the link between the development of tumours and the central nervous system has so far been very little studied. And this link is an amazing thing! It’s written here in so many words.’ He found the place. ‘It happens rarely, but there are cases of self-induced healing. You see how it’s worded? Not recovery through treatment, but actual healing. See?’

There was a stir throughout the ward. It was as though ‘self-induced healing’ had fluttered out of the great open book like a rainbow-coloured butterfly for everyone to see, and they all held up their forehead and cheeks for its healing touch as it flew past. 

‘Self-induced,’ said Kostoglotov, laying aside his book. He waved his hands, fingers splayed, keeping his leg in the same guitar-like pose. ‘That means that suddenly for some unknown reason the tumour starts off in the opposite direction! It gets smaller, resolves and finally disappears! See?’

They were all silent, gaping at the fairy-tale. That a tumour, one’s own tumour, the destructive tumour which had mangled one’s whole life, should suddenly drain away, dry up and die by itself?…..

It was only the gloomy Podduyev who made his bed creak and, with a hopeless and obstinate expression on his face, croaked out, ‘I suppose for that you need to have… a clear conscience.’ 

This understanding of cancer and its natural course of resolution in some cases mirrors my training and also experience with the Root Cause Institute. In fact, I quickly emailed the directors to tell them about this incredible knowledge that Solzhenitzyn had before his time.

I really don’t think this novel is only an allegory for Marxism-as-cancer. I’m not even sure it’s mainly that. I think it might be a very clear message to the world that cancer is not random, and not correctly treated or understood solely by medical methods. And we are all, patient and doctor alike, trapped in a system by our own fear, sometimes pride and also unwillingness to change: and this accompanied by the brutality of the systems around us that give us no room for nuance or subtlety in how we want to work with our cancers and our bodies as we aim for healing.

If living in a society with more freedom that Solzhenitsyn did means anything, it means that we have choice, power and the possibility of curiosity as we work with the medical model and also other systems of thought or belief in promoting our own health.

If you like reading, don’t mind reading something translated from Russian, and are curious about this book, I can heartily recommend it.