Avelum
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| Author | Otar Chiladze |
|---|---|
| Original title | აველუმი |
| Translator | Donald Rayfield |
| Country | Georgia |
| Language | Georgian |
| Genre | Magic realism, Philosophical fiction |
| Publisher | Garnett Press |
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Publication date
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1995. 16th 2013 in English. |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 348 pages |
| ISBN | |
Avelum, 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 Union writer, and on the tragedy of an idealist who damages irreparably every woman he cares for, and, in the end, himself.
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 of 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:
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