Kvachi: The Essence of Georgia in Literary Form

Book Review: Kvachi Kvachantiradze

If you want to breathe in the essence of Georgia in literary form, Kvachi Kvachantiradze is a good place to start.

Georgian author Mikheil Javakhishvili’s magnum opus is a boisterous picaresque bringing to life one of the country’s most compelling fictional characters.

The main character is Kvachi Kvachantiradze, an anti-hero evoking other unwholesome literary rogues like Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré. Kvachi is the perfect picaresque protagonist: born to a family of innkeepers in dusty, provincial Georgia – “on a deceitful, false, and treacherous day” – he is destined by hook or by crook to become a great man.

For Kvachi’s father Silibistro that means becoming a titled aristocrat. For our amoral anti-hero, it means amassing fame, fortune, and women in unlimited quantities: “Life is a struggle. What you can grab from it is yours, what you can’t is lost.”

Find out more in next week's edition of Georgia Today.

(Kvachi Kvachantiradze by Mikheil Javakhishvili, translated into English by Donald Rayfield and published by Dalkey Press in 2014. Photo: Mikheil Javakhishvili)

Joseph Larsen