Sacred Darkness The Last Days of the Gulag

Sacred Darkness: The Last Days of the Gulag by Levan Berdzenishvili is a remarkable work of testimony and historical imagination from one of Georgia’s most celebrated writers and intellectuals. Drawing on his own imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag during the 1980s — among the last political prisoners of the Soviet system — Berdzenishvili reconstructs the extraordinary figures he encountered: the poets, philosophers, priests, dissidents, and scholars who maintained their intellectual and spiritual lives in the camps. The result is a portrait gallery of a vanished world — of the Soviet intelligentsia at its most defiant and most human — that reads simultaneously as memoir, biography, and elegy. Published by Europa Editions, this is a vital document of twentieth-century history and a profound meditation on what it means to preserve one’s humanity in conditions designed to destroy it.