"The contribution outlines a particular dimension of the internment experience, that “remnant of spiritual freedom, of the free attitude of the ego towards the world – as Viktor Frankl explains – even in that state, only apparently of absolute compulsion”. Furthermore, it aims to present two cases in which this “remnant of humanity” is embodied in a literary memory which thus becomes a memory of authentic life, capable of brightening and shattering the nonsense of the forced labour camp. This is the experience that Primo Levi recounts in Chapter XI of Se questo è un uomo, in which the memory and the existential re-actualization of Dante’s Ulysses overcome the professed desperation of Levi’s title. This is the same experience as Georgij Aleksandrovič Lesskis did in 1939, when, in the horror of the Soviet correctional labour camp, was rescued, according to his own testimony, by the “fair, bright and warm world of Tolstoy’s War and Peace”."

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Given the religious metaphysics of Russian Realism (Steiner 1995: 49), repentance is one of the pivotal moments necessary for the characters of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s works: it is through repentance that such characters radically change their lives, become aware of evil committed, and renounce evil forever; in other words, they die and are reborn. The two great novelists have, however, two very different attitudes towards repentance: Tolstoy examines all its aspects in the psychological consciousness of his characters, while Dostoyevsky shows their necessary openness to the transcendent world.