Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Dr Andrei Gnezdilov (translation)

Ladies and gentlemen, Honoured Guests.

It is a great honour for me to be made an Honorary Doctor of Essex University.  As everyone knows, British education and science are highly regarded throughout the entire world.  Of course, recognition by a British university for the cause of serving the sick is at one and the same time appreciation both of our work, and also of the co-operation that has grown up between Britain and Russia.

The hospice movement in our country was born and has developed with the direct help of British colleagues.  It is the British model that has been followed for setting up hospices.  Material and spiritual support have been constantly present from the moment of the creation of the first hospice in Russia in St Petersburg in 1990, with the help of the British journalist Victor Zorza, and with the subsequent creation of regular courses to train doctors and nurses, organised by the charitable Colchester-based society, St Petersburg Healthcare Trust, in the person of Michael Siggs, Sue Beven, Norman Paros and others.  It is with particular gratitude that I should like to emphasise the assistance of those who served as our teachers and consultants, Robert Twycross, David Frampton and Wendy Jones.

More than ten years working in the hospice has meant a great deal for me personally.  Above all, it has made me aware of the importance of spirituality in the world.  It has provided an understanding of the sense and purpose of my life, which remain constants whatever systemic or psychological changes there may have been.  It is in the delight expressed, not in the literary way, but in the, at times, unobtrusive heroism of simple people in the face of death.  It has revealed the existence of an inner life, in which suffering may be transformed into a positive experience for the individual and into a treasure of the human spirit.  In the end, it has led me to a philosophy of optimism, as expressed in a single phrase by a dying woman: “I have lived the life I deserved and learned from it what I could.  And now I wish for something greater.”

It must not appear that I am preaching when I say that, sooner or later, death reveals to us more than does life itself.  For many it reveals the existence of one’s own soul, order in the chaos of human life, beauty in the thick of ugliness, and, finally and above all, the smile of God in the midst of endlessly changing life.