Avelum (A Survey of the Current Press and a Few Love Affairs)

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.)