Presentation 15 March 2018

ABSOLUTE DARKNESS BY LEVAN BERDZENISHVILI

14:30 Location: Leipzig Leipzig Book Fair, Forum Literatur Halle 5: Stand K600, Messe-Allee 1, 04356 Leipzig, Germany Organizer: Georgian National Book Center, Mitteldeutscher Verlag Author: Levan Berdzenishvili
Moderator: Christiane Hengevoß
Interepreter: Kakhaber Lominadze
Publisher: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2018
Partner: Konrad Adenauer Foundation Regional Program Political Dialogue in South Caucasus

Absolute Darkness holds a rare place between being a historical work and a novel. It is based entirely on true events, but brings stories together which could only be found in fiction. Spending several years in a prison camp, he came to know people that he would never have met elsewhere: people from across 15 countries of the USSR - leading writers, professors, scientists, teachers: all great people of wisdom, different in nationality but all sharing the same absurd fate. Each chapter holds someone’s name as a title: names of people that were imprisoned with him. Developing deep friendships, spending nights in political, philosophical and artistic discussion, these people were thrown in jail as a means of suppression. But an "enlightened" person knows how to make his time interesting. This is a story about how the Soviet system kept its best minds in the dark. But how did illuminated minds made this darkness holy?!