Vicdan – the Azerbaijani word for “conscience” – serves as the starting point for this column by Abil Hasanov. His writings interpret literature and philosophy as forms of self-affirmation and resistance: against dogma, against power, and against intellectual complacency. The focus is on thinkers and poets whose work affirms the unity of conviction and existence. Criticism appears here as a precise form of judgment—and as a practice of intellectual freedom.

Roberto Bolaño wrote By Night in Chile as if with a scalpel rather than a pen. Yet he does not cut through flesh—he cuts through the conscience. And from this wound flows not pus, but ancient Greek verse, Latin grammar, and church prayers. This is not the decline of a single individual, but the moral collapse of an entire era, an entire intellectual class.

The protagonist Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix—priest, literary critic, and professional non-seer—lies on his deathbed and embarks on a nocturnal journey through his conscience. This journey does not lead forward, however, but into the damp, dark corridors of memory. Urrutia wants to prove to us that he has always loved only art. That he has done nothing but read Aristotle, observe falcons, and roam the peaks of aesthetics. But how could he, from those heights, fail to see the events unfolding on the bloody streets below?

This is precisely where Bolaño’s mastery lies: he doesn't explain the horror of the dictatorship with tanks, but with the polite phrases of a priest teaching Pinochet about Marxism. He lets us hear the cracking of that intellectual spine as it bends before the dictator.

The most harrowing moment is at María Canales’s house. Upstairs, the Chilean elite drink wine and wax lyrical about poetry and European modernism—while in the basement of that same house, people are being tortured to death. This is the most brutal proof of how wonderfully culture can mask barbarism. Everyone hears the screams—but the taste of wine and the allure of rhyme drown them out.

This novel consists of a single paragraph. For one does not put a full-stop on the decay of conscience. Bolaño tells us: memorise the classics as much as you like—if your aesthetics are built upon the pain of others, this art is nothing more than a refined silence.

The more Urrutia speaks to clear his name, the deeper he sinks. For every word becomes a new confession of those years of silence. In the end, it becomes clear: some nights in history are so dark that remaining neutral means choosing the blackest of all colours.

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