“Another thing the searchers looked for in the morning: men wearing civilian dress under prison clothes. Never mind that everybody had been stripped of his civilian belongings long ago and told that he’d get them back the day his sentence ended (a day nobody in the camp had yet seen).” “One Day in the LifeContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Perpetual Sentence in the Gulag (Solzhenitsyn)”
Tag Archives: Soviet Literature
RKS Literature: Cancer Ward Patients Like Chickens Waiting to Have Their Heads Cut Off (Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn)
“But here in the clinic, sucking an oxygen balloon, eyes hardly able to roll, the tongue keeps on arguing, “I’m not going to die! I haven’t got cancer!” Just like chickens. A knife was ready and waiting for them, but they all carried on cackling and scratching for food. One was taken away to haveContinue reading “RKS Literature: Cancer Ward Patients Like Chickens Waiting to Have Their Heads Cut Off (Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn)”
RKS Literature: Radiation Madness in Soviet Cancer Treatment (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
“But then, ten, fifteen or eighteen years ago, when the term “radiation sickness” did not exist, X-ray radiation had seemed such a straightforward, reliable and foolproof method, such a magnificent achievement of modern medical technique, that it was considered retrograde, almost a sabotage of public health, to refuse to use it and to look toContinue reading “RKS Literature: Radiation Madness in Soviet Cancer Treatment (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)”
RKS Literature: Physicians are of the Highest Order (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
“The sternest and most solemn of all was that of the nurse Olympiada Vladislanova. For her the morning rounds were like a divine service for a deacon. She was a nurse for whom the doctors were of a higher order. She knew that doctors understood everything, never made mistakes and never gave wrong instructions. SheContinue reading “RKS Literature: Physicians are of the Highest Order (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)”
RKS Literature: Party Bigwig Pavel Nikolayevich’s Neck Tumour and Forced Equality of The Cancer Ward (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
“The hard lump of his tumor-unexpected, meaningless and quite without use-had dragged him like a fish on a hook and had flung him into this iron bed-a narrow, mean bed, with creaking springs and an apology for a mattress. Having once undressed under the stairs, said good-bye to this family and come up to theContinue reading “RKS Literature: Party Bigwig Pavel Nikolayevich’s Neck Tumour and Forced Equality of The Cancer Ward (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)”
RKS Literature: The Boss Man and Thievery at the Gulag (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
“What the boss man doles out is all you will get. Only you won’t get even that, what with the cooks and their stoolies and trusties. There’s thieving on the site, there’s thieving in the camp, and there was thieving before the food ever left the store.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “One Day in the Life ofContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Boss Man and Thievery at the Gulag (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)”
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