HY IS IT that Chaucer,
who wrote and lived six
turies ago, is so honored
lay by everyone who reads
glish?

Partly because, like Pushkin
‘Russia, he created a living
guage for the literature of
country.

ushkin found the literary
eech of his day an anemic
g in the grip of pedants.

Novels and poems were
‘itten in a high-falutin’ style,
f removed from the life of
people, and this academic
yle made for unreal senti-
2nts and false emotions.

Pushkin’s impulse was to
we Russian writing a shot in
arm by drawing on the ra-
' idiom of the peasants and
xkmen he met at fairs and
her gathering places up and
n the country, and within
eneration a new and more
ust Russian literature had

hat, more than four cen-
es before, was what Chau-
had done in England.

% sO 53

n his day, England had
en governed for nearly 300
ars by Norman-French in-
ders, who had imposed not
y their ideas and way of
fe upon the country but also
eir language.

‘Norman-French was used

all communication between
embers of the ruling classes
d Anglo-Saxon words were
dually taken into the vo-
bulary.

ore serious even was the
ay the imaginative life on
people was ignored and
ibmerged.

Tales of romantic knights
ere the only thing prized in
h places; what literature
ere was had to be shaped
cordingly to the artificial
de of chivalry.

'The songs and taproom
Ories of the people had to
ursue an obscure life under-
round.

Then came Chaucer with his
pusto, his humor, his great
oetic talent.

. He had mixed with all class-
s; he had been a page, a pri-
te soldier, a prisoner-of-war,
| public servant.

' He knew the way his coun-
ymen talked and the sort of
les they told when they were
thered together at leisure

Besides, in his travels abroad,
he had been influenced by
French culture and the story-
telling methods of Boccaccio.

_ An oldish man, out of a job
etween two regimes, he began
lis Canterbury Tales.

fhaucer-he created
robust tradition

In them the different types
of his day came to imagihative
life for the first time—monk
and merchant, cook and cour-
tier, lawyer and laborer, the
prim prioress, and the fruity-
mouthed Wife of Bath.

Chaucer presented them with
good humor and a rich sense
of humanity; more than that,
with an eye for democratic
values that was in advance of
his day, for no! one was allow-
ed precedence for anything
but character.

It was the purse-proud and
pretentious who most often
came a cropper.

503 xt %

The Canterbury Tales were
not only a set of stories; they
were a social portrait of Eng-
land. “

And Chaucer had enriched
the country’s language by com-
bining elements of~the two
original tongues; he had pro-
duced something that could be
read by all. Or, at least recog-
nized, for printing had not
yet been invented;

To be made known at the
time, a poem or tale had to be
read aloud in different places.

If it hit the public taste,
there would be a demand for
copies — in handwriting —
and the scriveners would get
busy.

But in the next century
(Chaucer died on the thres-
hold, in 1400) Caxton was to
appear with his printing press,
and this meant that the first
long poem to be printed in
English was democratic in
language as well’as content.

It would be hard to over-rate
the importance of this. A trad-
ition was laid down, a stand-
ard set.

Look at it in this way. There
are continual influences in

every country that go to make |

literature the preserve of a
special class, mirroring the
faces and ideas of those in
power and _ using their lan-
guage.

But such influences can
never triumph when there is
the work of a laughing human-
ist like Chaucer to set against
them.

Over the centuries he ra-
diates a spirit of tolerance for
anything but humbug, remind-
ing us that virtue and geneér-
osity lurk in all sorts of places
but rot often in people who
make too great a parade of
them.

VANCE PALMER

Ada Broadbent’s dancers, with their saucy Can-Can number,
the Theatre Under the Stars production of The Merry Widow.

week.

have been the hit of
It is now in its final

Soviets exploring every field

in efforts to conquer cancer

HOUSANDS of Soviet .doc-
tors and physicians at vari-
ous institutes, clinics and lab-
oratories are busy searching
for new methods in the treat-
ment and prevention of cancer.

World literature on’ cancer
has no uniform opinion on the
origin of cancer. Neither has
the Soviet Academy of Medi-
cine.

For instance, at a recent
session, the virologists Lev
Zilber and Alexander Timo-
feyevsky eagerly upheld the

virus theory. For them it was

natural, for they had discover-
ed_ virus-like particles in a
cancer tumor.

Research workers of the In-
stitute of Epidemiology and
Microbiology and those of the
Biology Institute of the Aca-
demy of Medicine succeeded in
discovering a specific antigen
(a body stimulating the pro-
duction of anti-bodies) in
people suffering from cancer.

It followed that if a vaccine
prepared from specific anti-
gens is injected into an ex-
perimental animal and then
this animal is infected with a
cancer tumor, the tumor would
gradually disappear, and the
animal would not fall sick.

This is certainly a very im-
portant discovery. If its find-
ings are confirmed by experi-
ments on human beings, then
the vaccine can be used as a
preventive measure: against
cancer tumors and a corres-
ponding serum for cancer
treatment can be prepared.

Another theory advanced by |

Leon Shabad and Nikolai Pet-
rov is that the origin of cancer
lies in chemical and physical
influence. After studying shale
tar and coal tar for a long
time, they were able to extract
chemically pure matters which
cause cancer.

Another research worker,
V. Streltsova, insists that can-

July 20, 1956 —

cer tumors originate from

ionizing radiation.

Other scientists believe that
the origin of cancer tumors
consists in over-excitation of
the cortex of the brain

The anti-cancer fight is not
only a biological problem, but
also a question of hygiene.
Scientists proved that in study-
ing anti-cancer measures one
should consider the canceri-
genic matter which comes to
the human organism from at-
mosphere polluted by the
waste of industrial enter-
prises.

There is plenty of opinion
and argument concerning the
origin of cancer. We cannot
tell which line will triumph.
One thing is beyond doubt,
that we are on the road to dis-
covering the laws in this prob-
lem.

V. TIMAKOV

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 13

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