January 2019 Fiction Lead Titles

Sacred Darkness Levan Berdzenishvili, translated by Brian James Baer

Sacred Darkness
Levan Berdzenishvili, translated by Brian James Baer


Sacred Darkness is at once historical essay and novel. It is based entirely on true events, but brings stories together which could only be found in fiction.

Several years in a prison camp gave the author an opportunity 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, of different nationalities but all sharing the same absurd fate. Each chapter holds someone’s name as a title: names of people that were imprisoned with the author. 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 brightest citizens in the dark, and yet in that darkness those prisoners forged bonds that were stronger than their confines.