Tolstoy’s text and intertextuality in Solzhenitsyn’s novel “Cancer Ward”

The present research paper is dedicated to the problem of differentiation between Tolstoy’s texts and intertextual elements in Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” by means of revealing the frequency and relevance of an appeal to the ideas of Tolstoy as well as Stalin, Gorky, Bacon, Pushkin, Herverg. In “Cancer Ward” Tolstoy’s ideas put forward in the story “What Men Live by”, in the short novel “Cossacks” and in the novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, engender disputes between their characters about the meaning of life. These ideas serve as a rate scale of the events, set the highest religious and moral objectives, influence reflecting characters thus, leading some of them to the adoption of his ideas and spiritual resurrection whereas others to the search for their own answers to the question of being. In Solzhenitsyn’s short novel the title of Tolstoy’s story “What Men Live by” serves as an epigraph; the system of characters is built in accordance with the person’s integration into the dialogue with Tolstoy’s ideas and the cultural heritage. Oleg Kostoglotov bearing in mind Tolstoy’s lessons does not take anyone’s opinions on trust. He develops his own attitude to everything that is happening and becoming spiritually transformed he triumphed over death. The quoted opinions of the philosophers, political leaders and writers about “social” behavior of the Man are “secondary” compared with the ontological values presented in Tolstoy’s works and do not play a determinative role in the formation of Solzhenitsyn’s characters’ worldview. In terms of genre composition, the “Cancer Ward” is a philosophical and publicist short novel. The predominance of Tolstoy’s text over the intertextuality is an additional evidence of the timeless significance of his ideas for people of the following centuries.