Hamid Ismailov
Doomed Empire of Love
Avelum
By Otar Chiladze (Translated by Donald Rayfield)
Garnett Press 349pp £15 order from our bookshop
Avelum was the fifth novel by Otar Chiladze, who died in 2009. It was first published in Georgian in 1995, and now appears in an English translation by Donald Rayfield, a connoisseur of Russian and Georgian literature. Set in the period between two anti-Soviet demonstrations in Tbilisi – the first in March 1956 and the second in April 1989 – it tells the story of Avelum, a Georgian writer living in the USSR. His name, Chiladze explains, means ‘free citizen with full civic rights’. It is a bitter work, full of frustration, sadness and scepticism.
Chiladze ruthlessly diagnoses the condition of the USSR in its final decades. It’s a place in which a scientist cuts the throat of a seven-year-old girl with the rusty lid of a jam jar, a doctor murders and rapes his patients and a cannibalistic barber lives alongside underage whores, drunks,
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