Levan Berdzenisvili - Holy sötétség - A Gulag last napjai

Levan Berdzenisvili (1953) is a Georgian writer, politician, academic, founding member of the illegal Georgian Republican Party (1978), director of the Tbilisi National Parliamentary Library (1998-2004), member of parliament (2012-2016). He graduated as a classical philologist in Tbilisi. He earned his doctorate from the works of Aristophanes and translated all his comedies into Georgian. He spent three years (1984-1987) as a political prisoner in the Gulag on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda.
"They were the best years of my life," the author writes half-seriously, because on the one hand he was young, and on the other hand, due to the zeal of the KGB, he got into great company: in this last Gulag era, during glasnost and perestroika, it was a gathering place for exceptional people, artists and intellectuals the labor camp. As punishment, the prisoners sewed gloves as a standard, and in their free time they learned dead languages ​​from each other, debated the possibility or impossibility of real communism, played the guitar, sang, ordered books by mail, organized a poetry evening, and held Socratic dialogues in the midst of collective starvation - among other things about the best food in the world .
The Holy Darkness is a serene obituary of an era. Accounting. The idea to write it was born on a hospital bed, on the enlightening boundary between darkness and light. In it, the author commemorates his comrades in the camp, each seriously, emotionally or entertainingly, with a wry humor, since these elite circles included a different colorful individual, a kind of village fool, or a person so inexperienced in politics, who defended human rights and he roughly equated democracy with homosexuality.