Goings-on in the Gulag
LEVAN BERDZENISHVILI’S, Sacred Darkness, The Last Days of the Gulag (Translated from the Russian by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner,Europa editions, £12.99) is a collection of stories about a group of citizens from the Soviet Union. Levan Berdzenishvili himself was a political dissident who was jailed for three-and-a-half years on the basis of trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet political activism and agitation, specifically organising “criminal groups… and publish[ing] The Bell
an illegal outlet… for the dissemination of anti-Soviet Materials”).
But rather than it being the nightmare he expected, jail allowed Berdzenishvili direct access to a wide array of intellectuals, professionals, citizens from all walks of life, “people the KGB had so zealously brought together” and whom, as Berdzenishvili puts it, he would not have had the chance to meet if he had not been in jail.
In this wonderfully moving collection, Berdzenishvili, who, after his release from prison, became a journalist, academic and a politician, bears witness to those varied lives. Each chapter carries a person’s name and focuses on a single story.
So we come to know Arkady, a “harmless village fool”, who was thrown into jail as a “traitor to the motherland and war criminal”, and
Grisha, a Jew who graduated from high school, worked as an electrician and, as Berdzenishvili insists, “hadn’t committed any crime — it’s just that he was a Jew and, in the war with the Arabs, he’d rooted for Israel”.
We also meet Johnny, “one of the best taxi drivers in the history of Tbilisi,” and Vadim, a mathematician by education but in real life “a topologist, philologist, philosopher, polyglot, physicist, chemist, Brainiac…” who, in 1982, was arrested – like many others — for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.
Berdzenishvili admits that he set pen to paper “not to write a great work of literature” but “to rescue characters who [were] about to disappear… be lost… and no one would ever know that they had existed and that their life had meaning”.
He succeeds — and deserves our praise for introducing us to 14 extraordinary characters who, collectively, present a multifaceted picture of life in the Soviet Union.
AHRON BREGMAN
Arkady was a “harmless village fool”, who was thrown into jail as a “traitor to the motherland”