TY - JOUR AU - Pietro Tosco PY - 2011/11/26 Y2 - 2024/03/19 TI - Primo Levi and Ivan Denisovič: The Literary Act between Representation and Expressive Capacity JF - Between JA - BW VL - 1 IS - 2 SE - Genres and Forms DO - 10.13125/2039-6597/309 UR - https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/309 AB - Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich are two “literary acts” that have contributed significantly to the historical knowledge of the 20th century: the first in the West of the Nazi concentration camps, the second in the East of the Soviet gulags. Why are they so famous? Do they have something that unites them? This paper aims to analyze the power of literature as a place of knowledge and self-consciousness. If the works of Levi and Solzhenitsyn have a very high value as a witnesses, the power of this testimony is given by the “literary gesture” from which they spring, a gesture that produces a synthetic knowledge in which universals exist only in the particular. ER -