In Search of Lavrenti Beria
Tamta Melashvili s 2015 novel, Eastwards
, from which this excerpt comes, is the story of a young woman, Irina, in present-day Georgia, who is simultaneously suffering from depression, a vanished lover, and a taboo medical condition, vaginismus. She is researching Elene Dariani, a mystical poet believed to have had a secret affair with the famous Georgian poet Paolo Iashvili. Cofounder in 1915 of the Blue Horn Symbolists, Iashvili committed suicide in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Purge, when many Georgian writers were executed. In this extract––which references other famous Georgian poets such as Titsian Tabidze and Galaktion Tabidze––Irina is beginning to imagine that Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenti Beria (who, like Stalin, was Georgian) was implicated in the poets’ mythic love affair.
Falling Apart
Davit Gabunia s cinematic debut novel, Falling Apart
, from which this excerpt comes, recalls Rear Window
in its dark exploration of voyeurism, and broke ground it its treatment of a male sexual liaison. Gabunia found fame aged twenty-two as the Georgian translator of Harry Potter, and later Shakespeare and Ibsen.
The people in the photo look like blue and black blotches. I can’t pick out Tina. Just last night she was lying in bed, the door to the bedroom wardrobe open, the wardrobe out of which she’d taken her clothes and packed them up. If last night she’d woken up and said,
A Small Country
Lasha Bugadze s A Small Country
, which won the Saba, IliaUni, and Writers’ House Litera prizes in Georgia––all for novel of the year in 2018––is based on the real scandal surrounding the publication of the author s 2001 short story “The First Russian.” The story outraged some MPs and clergy with its satirical allusions to the wedding night of Georgia’s revered medieval Queen Tamar, whose first husband was a Russian prince. The author found himself censured in parliament and threatened with excommunication.
I remember the man sitting at an oak table took two pieces of paper from a drawer and addressed me with a smile:
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