Otar Chiladze - a novel by Georgia’s greatest 20th century novelist about the simultaneous breakdown of the Soviet ‘Empire of Evil’ and the hero’s ‘empire of love’

 
Otar Chiladze, Avelum. Trans. by Donald Rayfield.  Garnett Press, 2013.

novel by Georgia’s greatest 20th century novelist, about the simultaneous breakdown of the Soviet ‘Empire of Evil’ and the hero’s ‘empire of love’

This, Otar Chiladze's fifth novel, is the second to be translated into English. The story of a Georgian writer whose private ‘empire of love’ collapses with the ‘empire of evil’, it was published in 1995, and is the first work in which Chiladze was free of Soviet censorship, living in an independent, albeit chaotic, strife-torn Georgia. He no longer clothes in myth his portrayal of the predicament of a Georgian and an intellectual under alien tyranny, but vents his indignation at the fate of Georgia in a novel which stretches for 33 years, the life of Christ, between the Tbilisi massacres by Soviet special forces of March 1956 and April 1989. This is a deeply personal work (but we must not identify the hero Avelum with his creator, even though Avelum is a novelist whose themes of the Minotaur and Icarus resemble Chiladze’s own). Its plot centres on a love affair between a western girl and a Soviet writer, and on the tragedy of an idealist who damages irreparably every woman he cares for, and, in the end, himself. (The Russian translation of Avelum was refused by every publisher in Moscow, even though Chiladze's other novels were best sellers in Russia.)

Avelum is about a Georgian writer named Avelum -- a name which the author suggests: "is Sumerian and means 'free citizen with full civic rights', although the only source I have for this etymology is an old notebook of mine" -- who closely resembles author Chiladze. If not exactly fictional biography, Chiladze's portrait of Avelum is nevertheless very personal, right down to the similar works they have written.
       Chiladze explains that he means to convey that: 
all his life Avelum has tried in every way to be just that -- a free citizen with full civic rights in a country, even if that country exists only in his imagination.
       Avelum is very much a novel a Georgia -- a Soviet Socialist Republic for most of Avelum's (and Chiladze's) life, but the book written and first appearing in a newly independent nation. There's a sense of fatalism -- "Probably nothing more was going to change for a long time here in Georgia, assuming that anything ever changed" -- while throughout Avelum struggles with his role in the process of political change. Two dates mark his life, both instantly recognizable to Georgian readers (both also sometimes call the 'Tbilisi massacre'): 9 March 1956, when Soviet troops fired on protesting students, and 9 April 1989, when Soviet troop again fired on protesters.
       These are historically fraught dates: 9 March was the third anniversary of the death of (Georgian-born) Stalin, and the protests in part a reaction to Khrushchev's 20th Congress denunciation of Stalin. As to the 9 April events: while it would be two more years before independence was declared, the 1989 clash was the turning point in anti-Soviet protests -- and is still celebrated as a public holiday in Georgia, the Day of National Unity.
       On both days, Avelum feels he falls short. In 1956 he sees an injured boy but is unable to really help him. In 1989 his daughter, called Little Katie, takes part in the protests, and winds up deeply scarred by events, compounding uninvolved Avelum's feelings of guilt.
       These two separate events and their fallout, so important in both the history of Georgia and in Avelum's own life, hover over the entire book, even as Chiladze shifts his focus elsewhere. Much of the novel, in fact, deals with entirely different matters -- in particular, Avelum's efforts at flight, both geographically and into love-affairs (his attempts to flee connected, as he travels to Moscow and abroad because of the women in his life).
       Avelum is married to Melania, the mother of Little Katie, and despite his straying he remains devoted to her and their family-unit in Tbilisi -- in no small part because of their shared history, which is also their shared national history: 
Of all of Avelum's womanfolk, only Melania could understand him, because they endured together 9 March 1956 and 9 April 1989
       Still, back in still securely Soviet times Avelum and Françoise, visiting from France, began a long-lasting relationship. First mainly in a roundabout back and forth of letters, but then much more up-close-and-personal, when Françoise found an opportunity to move to Moscow for two years. Her great desire is, if she can't have Avelum all to herself, at least to have his child -- which she then does back in France, a girl that Avelum doesn't see until he visits when she is already thirteen years old (even then the visit happening: "more thanks to 'perestroika' than to his own efforts" -- in this as in many matters, he doesn't prove himself to be much of a man of action or initiative). Avelum doesn't lose touch with Françoise over the years, and there are reunions, but he also takes a new mistress back in the Soviet Union, Sonia -- to keep him busy or distracted: he's a man of passions, but rather self-absorbed in them.
       When their affair is still in its earliest stages, someone happens to tell Françoise about Avelum: 
The man is pretty well our best known Georgian, but as a womaniser, not a writer.
       While clearly a well-established writer, the focus in Avelum is on his personal life. There is some mention of his (Chiladze-echoing) work and preoccupations, such as Abelum's dreams that are variations on "various episodes from his last novel" -- but literature hardly figures anywhere at the fore any longer. It is also a sign of the times, especially the times of Soviet collapse, as Chiladze notes: 
But we, today's people, don't want literature any more. At best, we sell our books for recycling (as lavatory paper) or, if we need to, we use books as cheap fuel. Yes sir. As you like.
       A bit later, he hammers home his point: 
One idiotic novel can easily give us tow or three rolls of lavatory paper. Anyway, to be frank, food for the soul, like any other food, sooner or later ends up as excrement of one kind or another.
       In some ways a larger than life figure, Avelum seems constantly to feel marginalized. His writing doesn't occupy an important place in these time any longer, it would seem, and the women in his life are set on their own paths, which he can stray onto but doesn't seem to play a significant role in. So, while his illegitimate French daughter greets him eagerly the first time they meet, by the time she's fifteen her focus is entirely elsewhere. Damaged Little Katie is largely lost to him, and his mistresses have lives of their own in which he plays, at best a peripheral role. It's tough for needy Avelum: 
I was like the refugee trying to cram into a suitcase more than it would hold. Actually, I was trying to find a place in my life for love: that's why my whole being, all my life, was as taut as a violin string or a bow-string, to the point of pain
       Avelum remains a bystander to most events, marked already by the memory of the boy he couldn't save in 1956. Yet he is keenly aware -- and deeply troubled -- by what he sees and what happens, and especially the violent upheavals around him. Self-absorbed, he retreats into his love-affairs, but even he recognizes they only offer so much escape.
       Over the course of the novel Chiladze impressively presents a national portrait along that of Avelum: Georgia, and questions of national identity, purpose, and history repeatedly figure and are addressed, both overtly and more subtly. It is a novel specifically of transition -- even as it shows how transition itself is a constant -- and turns expertly on 9 April 1989 to present a remarkable account of this particular Georgian changeover, within the context of both Georgian history but also personal experience. In focusing so much on the personal, Chiladze also conveys history to much greater effect than more obviously 'historical' novels generally do.
       A powerful, personal work. - M.A.Orthofer

Otar Chiladze, A Man Was Going Down the Road, Trans. by Donald Rayfield.  Garnett Press, 2013.

 Set in Vani, the semi-legendary capital of Colchis (as western Georgia was called in antiquity), Otar Chiladze’s first novel of 1972 explores the Georgian ramifications of the myth of Jason, the Golden Fleece and Medea, weaving his own inventions with Greek myth and history. (Daedalus and Icarus, as well as King Minos play a part in the story, too.) At the same time, the novel explores very modern predicaments of the idealist who unwittingly destroys his family. The mythical Greek intervention in Colchis is subtly told by Chiladze as an allegory of Russia’s and the Soviet Union’s subversion and conquest of Georgia.


 Otar Chiladze (1933–2009) is by consensus the most important novelist of the 20th century in Georgia. His first novel ( also the first of his works to be translated into English), A Man Was Going Down the Road, is the key to his later work. It begins with the Greek legend of Jason and the golden fleece and the consequences for the obscure kingdom of Colchis after the Greek Jason comes and abducts Medea. But it is also an allegory of the treachery and destruction that ensued when Russia, and then the Soviets, annexed Georgia, as well as Chiladze’s interpretation of life as a version of the ancient Anatolian story of Gilgamesh, and a study of Georgian life, domestic and political, in which women and children pay the price for the hero’s quests, obsessions and doubts.

 I read a review of this translation of the Georgian writer Chiladze in the Times Literary Supplement--imagine my surprise to find it as a low-cost Kindle book. The story takes place in Colchis--home of Medea--now Georgia, with a touch of "magic realism" rather than the pre-history of the Jason and Medea myth. The translation is beautiful (as I imagine the original Georgian is) and I've seen only very few typos (missing little words here and there). The medieval illustration is of Jason and Medea, but is the wrong period for the tone and style of the book, which is from a modern semi-fairy-tale point of view (open-eyed narrators of bizarre but personally felt events and relationships). The Jason and Medea "story" is but the first third of the book. The second section stays in the same location, with some of the same characters, but tracks another family of emotional cripples and misfits. One goes as a stonecutter to Crete (to help build Minos's palace at Knossos), but all sense of a real landscape disappears under the weight of larger-than-life, inarticulate anguishes careening about against a tan and grey sea light, in a sea without fish.

ThisandThat