Kvachi

"Mikheil Javakhishvili is considered one of the main architects of 20th-century Georgian literature. Javakhishvili started out as a short story writer, and, later in his career, in 1924, he wrote his first, picaresque novel Kvachi Kvachantiradze , thus, laying a foundation for realism in Georgian literature. Rayfield’s translation, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2015, was listed by William Boyd among his “best holiday reads”, in the Guardian , so it seems people are finally catching on. Yes, he’s often referred to as “the Georgian Felix Krull.” He’s a conman who lives in Stalin’s Russia and the book narrates his exciting and fantastic adventures. Kvachi, being an accomplished villain of rare wit, manages to take possession of other people’s property, money and fame by flawless cunning. His confidence tricks are not limited to Georgia alone, but reach St. Petersburg, Paris and even London: his wealth increases and so does the extent of his fraud. Murders, robbery (both of people and banks) and fraud are part of Kvachi’s every-day life. The crimes committed by him and a group of his subordinate swindlers and robbers lead to the misery and death of many people. He would sacrifice everything and everyone for his own personal gain and career success, without subsequent remorse or repentance. “The novel illustrated the moral decline of the governing circles of the Russian Empire with great precision and truth—so, needless to say, it was banned” As critics have suggested, at that time there would have been plenty of real prototypes in the Soviet Union for the author to draw inspiration from. These included Vasil Dumbadze, a Georgian aznauri (a Georgian term for the lowest rank of nobility) and financier, notorious for his adventures and a scandalous military career at the Ministry of War of the Russian Empire; Mikhail Andronikov, a Russian prince and adventurist; and Solomon Ashordia, a talented Georgian conman, famous for document falsification, who used forged bank documents to steal about five million Roubles from the Russian banks. Kvachi’s grotesque image enabled Javakuishvili to point a finger at the social structure and system that produced such “heroes.” He also illustrated the moral decline of the governing circles of the Russian Empire with great precision and truth—so, needless to say, Kvachi and Javakhishvili’s other novels were banned in the Soviet Union. If anyone of the great Georgian novelists had, and has, the potential of gaining worldwide recognition, it’s Mikheil Javakhishvili. In addition to being a writer, he was also a famous public and political figure, one of the leaders of the national liberation movement between 1921 and 1924. He was a great thinker and one of the leading journalists of his time. From the start of his career in the early 1900s, he was extremely critical of the Russian Empire’s repressive tactics. He temporarily disappeared, slipping into exile to avoid persecution by the authorities, and went to study at a Parisian university; he travelled around Europe afterwards, and returned to Georgia in 1913. There, from around 1917, he became actively involved in the national movement, and became one of the founding members of the National-Democratic party. Remember that Georgia managed to gain independence and form a democratic republic, although it lasted only for three years (between 1918 and 1921), until the Bolsheviks invaded and occupied the country. Following the “sovietisation”, Javakhishvili was a member of the independence committee of Georgia between 1922 and 1924, and became actively involved in the planning and preparation of the 1924 rebellion. Yes, but in fact it was around this time that his literary career—which had been mostly short stories beforehand—had a second flourishing. Javakhishvili published brilliant stories and novels in sequence. He wrote with equal interest and excitement about human nature, moral issues, and life under the rule of the newly established Soviet regime, a person’s duty to his family, his nation and motherland. More importantly, he managed to convey all that in a wonderfully expressive and realistic manner. A year from the completion of Kvachi Kvachantiradze , Javakhishvili composed another important novel, Jaqo’s Dispossessed , in which he contrasts an educated yet inert and passive man with a vulgar, illiterate, brutal man of action—he presents both as dangerous social phenomena. Indeed and his fate was largely determined by his final realist novel, A Woman’s Burden , which, according to some critics, signalled that the writer, being no longer able to counter the oppression by the Soviet government, had broken down morally and spiritually and decided to write a text that would please the Soviets and save his life. Except Javakhishvili seemed unable to accomplish that heavy mission, and ended up doing quite the opposite, enraging the Bolshevik government even more. The Soviet ideologist Vladimr Ermolov condemned the novel, stating that the text portrayed Bolsheviks as terrorists in pre-revolutionary Georgia. The authorities also began to suspect Javakhishvili of assisting a fellow activist, another wonderful Georgian author Grigol Robakidze, to emigrate to Germany. Eventually—after a further complication over the suicide of the poet Paolo Iashvili (whom Javakhishvili, much to the Soviet’s ire, said “seems to have been a true hero, braver than all of us”)—Javakhishvili was declared a spy and a deviant by the Presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers. Javakhishvili, now branded a counter-revolutionary terrorist, was arrested soon afterwards, mutilated in Lavrenti Beria’s presence and forced to sign an act of confession. That same year, in 1937, he was shot. There is a striking passage in the memoirs of Javakhishvili’s daughter: following her father’s death, she found herself at a reception in Moscow, where she met Stalin. He asked her about her father, and she answered that her father had been shot. Stalin feigned surprise and said there must have been some mistake…"