Laugh heartily while reading the reminiscences of a gulag prisoner?
Unimaginable, indecent!
And yet, it is the effect aroused by
Ténèbresacres
, by the Georgian Levan Berdzenichvili, 68, a specialist in Greek and Latin literature, in love with France, involved in the political life of his country.
At the age of 25, under Brezhnev, he had created with his younger brother the first clandestine political party in Georgia, republican and independentist.
In 1983, after spending six months in a KGB cell, he was sent to a re-education camp in Mordovia.
"The most significant event of my life"
, he writes - we want to believe it, other great witnesses of the gulag could have said as much: Solzhenitsyn, Ginzburg, Chalamov… But he goes further.
In this camp, he says,
“I spent the best three years of my life, the most rewarding.
(...) Where else could I have rubbed shoulders with all these men so carefully gathered by the KGB?”
See also
Russia, a land of inspiration for literature
Unlike the dreadful Stalin era...
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