Avelum by Otar Chiladze
Journey to Karabakh by Aka Morchiladze
Adibas by Zaza Burchuladze
When a small but strategic country with a rich literary
history receives its first credible contemporary translations, one feels a new
level of international companionship has been reached. The last couple of years
have finally allowed us to say this safely about Georgia – a nation, which, prior
to the time of Shakespeare, possessed a literary inheritance almost comparable
to that of England.
For the 70 years until 1991, Georgia had been subsumed into
the Soviet Union and more or less disappeared from the world stage. Mostly it
flickered in and out of international consciousness via references in 19th
century Russian literature. Mikhail Lermontov's Hero of Our Time opens on the Georgian Military Highway; his
Romantic poem The Demon is set there,
and the area often features in Pushkin and Tolstoy's work.
But its native
writers were rarely allowed to reach out of their mountain fastness – until independence
in the 1990s, when the Russian language began its rapid decline in the
Caucasus.
Monument to Alexander Pushkin reads 'I have known no pleasure more luxurious than the baths of Tbilisi' (c) Maxim Edwards
This new doorway into a culture is useful on many levels.
As a result, this new doorway into a culture is useful on
many levels, particularly for such a famously unpredictable nation whose
political twists and turns love to confound the experts; witness the victory of
Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party in the October 2012 parliamentary
election.
Watched intensely by the international community but predicted by no
one, this single result – Georgia’s first genuinely democratic change of
government – shifted the strategic weather vane in the Caucasus and put an end
to the decaying era of former President Mikhiel Saakashvili.
Avelum
In cases like this, literature could have helped the
experts, both homegrown and international. Anyone reading Otar Chiladze's
depictions of the proudly emotional Georgian national character in his powerful
fifth novel Avelum (1995) would not have been so surprised to see
the tarmac of Tbilisi's Rustaveli Avenue fill with yet another sea of humanity
on 1 October 2012.
The novel is an earnest, Georgian investigation into the
concept of freedom, both personal and political – in a nation where such quests
so often manifest on the streets. The main character’s name ‘Avelum,’ is
claimed as the Sumerian word for ‘freedom’ – implying the timelessness of the
search. He hunts it out everywhere, but being a poet, particularly through the
medium of love. He is provided with a wife in Georgia, a lover in Moscow and he
sires a child with his French mistress. But none of these grasps at happiness
work; nor the opportunities offered by each of their countries – the West is
depicted as merely a different version of the ‘prison’ into which he was born.
He is also made to witness the March 1956 demonstrations in Tbilisi as a young
man, then the Perestroika demonstrations in April 1989 as a parent. Both
resulted in savage massacres by the Soviet authorities, but in the latter case,
followed by the arrival of a political 'freedom' when Georgia became a
sovereign country in 1991.
The rapidly ensuing civil war is presented as an
example of what happens when the emotions unleashed by sudden liberation land
on a society unprepared to absorb them. In the demonstrations leading up to the
9 April 1989 massacre, Avelum describes his daughter, ‘little Katie’s’
instinctive sense of the concept but without any of its accompanying knowledge,
which he, as her flawed parent, frustratedly can’t find a way to provide.
'She never even
hinted, 'I can't understand, could you explain.' Quite the opposite; she
reacted to everything the same way: 'I knew anyway, so why ask.' She couldn't
wait to attach artificial wings to her shoulders … She waved her homemade
flag like a wing and leapt onto a tank.'
This quest to become either a hero or a martyr is a significant element in the Georgian character.
This quest to become either a hero or a martyr is a
significant element in the Georgian character, but like all impulses, requires
an education. The narrator’s mind tumbles through a series of brilliant rants
in which the multiple voices in his head (and by inference Georgia's) start
arguing against each other as a delirious inner monologue.
While perhaps
confusing for readers unfamiliar with recent Georgian history, together the
voices make an eerie kind of sense. They superbly articulate the feelings
spinning round the nation at the time of its writing (the early 1990s) and
serve as a check-list for all the doubts, suspicions, cynicism, wild hopes
accompanying the popular ideas of freedom, or one could even say the then
‘Georgian dream,’ in the sense of an American Dream. Each page seems to carry a
memorable line connected to one of these emotions – 'Even the earth's
rotation is against us …' on page 212.
It is no surprise that the original Georgian version was nominated for the Nobel Prize
in 1999.
But the country's democratic change of government in October
2012 shows that Childaze’s concept has indeed taken on some education.
Confounding many observers again, Saakashvili did not send troops onto the
streets and cling onto power, but gracefully handed over the reins to a rival more
adept in his understanding of the voices in Avelum's head.
For the English version we must thank the redoubtable Donald
Rayfield and his Garnet Press, who with a bit of help from the Georgian
Ministry of Culture’s book translation programme, provided the first English
translation in 2013.
These translation projects are vital for nations like
Georgia, much of whose talent lies concealed behind a complex, and in this
case, non Indo-European language and script. Until now, publishing had been a
very local affair in Georgia, with the occasional tantalising clue leaking out,
usually via Russia. Until the end of the Soviet Union most British people’s
knowledge of Georgia as a country only began in 1982 when the Rustaveli Theatre
presented its extraordinary, burlesque version of Richard III at London’s Roundhouse.
This led to subsequent
invitations: the Tumanishvili's Theatre's Midsummer
Night's Dream and a no less compelling Don
Juan at Edinburgh. All these hinted at an emotional intelligence struggling
to emerge out of all the emotion.
Journey to Karabakh
Some of this can be witnessed in another important Georgian
novel given to the outside world via the Book Translation programme – Journey to Karabakh by Aka Morchiladze.
Written around the same period as Avelum, but by a writer not much older
than Avelum’s daughter, this far shorter modern fable of the Caucasus is
excellently translated by Elizabeth Highway and published by Dalkey Archive
Press.
Georgian author Zaza Burchaladze. CC Ikeshel
This is a gripping tale, right from the first page when the narrator tells
us he's somehow been persuaded into a crazy journey across the southern
Caucasus. The reader is then carried along in a delightful carriage of Georgian
charm (in fact a mud-splattered, bullet-ridden Lada) into the heart of an absolutely appalling situation – the Armenia-Azerbaiiajan war in Nagorno-Karabakh. The wily yet helpless 24-year-old narrator, Gio, with his
'completely stupid' friend Goglik, finds himself driving his father's car
accidentally into a war zone that would generate over a million refugees. Not
only a superb metaphor, the slapstick undertone demonstrates that
remarkable Georgian ability to carry optimism into the blackest of
predicaments.
It is also a reminder that in the Caucasus there is often
nothing better than a good joke, or failing that a great disaster. But the people Gio encounters in his unenthusiastic search for
drugs – the friendly, money-sniffing Azeri and Armenian paramilitaries – present
for any outsider a vivid snapshot of the southern Caucasian nationalities, not always seen at their best.
In the Caucasus there is often nothing better than a good joke, or failing that a great disaster.
Which brings up the topic of Georgia's war with Russia in
August 2008. Reading Journey to Karabakh, it sometimes seems that this enduring hunger for drama played
a role in the calamity. Although both sides will hotly deny it, it’s hard not
to detect the urge for a scrap in the two opposing governments.
The theory
receives a boost with the discovery that afterwards the Saakashvili regime funded
a major feature film about the disaster Five
Days of War, in which Andy Garcia plays Mikhiel Saakashvili, albeit with a
quite surreal Russian accent. One wonders what Otar Childaze would have made of
that.
Adibas
Unfortunately, Chiladze died just too soon, but another young
Georgian writer in the Dalkey Archive series, Zaza Burchuladze, did have a go.
His
novel Adibas is set during those
actual five days of war, in which the main character is a vacuous materialist
and sex maniac. Written in the first person, the novel presents the worst
kind of new Georgian male cavorting around Tbilisi as the Russian tanks bear
down on the city (in reality they stopped 50km short having made their point),
even accepting a part in a Pepsi commercial at the moment of greatest crisis.
While there is definitely a metaphor here too, the book’s sustained attack on
US-style consumerism never really shows the reader anything beyond it. But the anger is real and such a reaction helps articulate many Georgians’ sense of
intense shame and frustration at this war. And one feels a respect for the
author because he wrote it at a time when Saakashvili was still president and
his minister of interior,
Vano Merabishvili, was sending government opponents to jail like there was no
tomorrow. There could be
some Andy Garcia-style irony in the fact that Vano himself now languishes in
one of his own jails.
Meanwhile, one truly hopes that the periods of civil war may
be over, even if the external forces keep pushing their fingers across
Georgia's borders – Western consumerism no less than the old Russian colonial
dream. As the new Georgian government struggles to carve out a middle-path
between the two, one recalls Otar Chiladze’s words in Avelum, written back in the dark mid-1990s:
'The idea of freedom
has only just been born in the labyrinth, which is why there is such a strong
smell of blood and tears. Blood and tears are candles, bread and wings for the
soul. Yet true freedom is, I expect, what doesn't need wings to fly.'
