By Tomás G. Muñoz, Málaga

Book review:  "Timeless"
By: Prince Nicholas Tchtokoua
Mta Publications, London (197 pages)

Practically throughout its history, Russia has known little beyond despotic rulers. Yet, its literature  evolved significantly, first beginning with the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, then the Golden Era of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov.  To the chagrin of the Soviet rulers, in the XX century  there flourished Pasternak, Sholojov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and émigés like Bunin and Nabokov. Nevertheless, as neither Tsarist Russia nor the Soviet Union had any interest in the dissemination of writings in other languages within its  boundaries, not much else developed.

Timeless stands as the only novel written by a Georgian ―albeit in the exile.    The author, Prince Nicholas Tchtokoua (1906-1984) fled the Bolshevik invasion of 1921.  In the 30s, as thousands of Georgians were massacred during Stalin´s reign of terror, the prince traveled worldwide as a Representative of the Knights of Malta, and exposed the Soviet régime´s crimes.  One of his death´s wishes was for his heart to be buried in Georgian soil, which one of his sons achieved.

First published in 1949, and recently re-released, Timeless resorts to a platonic love affaire between Shota d´Iberio, a Georgian prince, and Taya, a Russian princess as a frame to delve into human nature, Georgia, its people, geography, landscapes and traditions. The author also plays with themes like the Latin American realismo mágico (magic realism), while there are trickles from Mann´s Magic Mountain as the hero does a stint in Davos to recover from TB, something that plays havoc with his amorous life.  And Borges´s symbolic questions pop up here and there.

Prince Nicholas brings a Basque scholar and his theories that the Iberians from the East, forerunners of the Georgians, eventually migrated west and brought Euskera, the Basque language.  However, though there are many theories among the common origins of the oriental and the occidental Iberians, there is no conclusive evidence so far.  Nevertheless, the author has done his homework by poking into a little known subject.

The author vividly depicts Georgian winter scenes, monasteries in snow-capped mountains in the middle of the Caucasus, singing birds, rivulets, and bells, an ignorant and domineering mother, some plotting  aristocrats, all within the never-never lands and times where the Eastern upper classes lived  before the Russian Revolution.  Towards the end of the novel, the hero asks himself whether he can love two different women at the same time, and vice-versa.  He gets three affirmative answers, though with a twist of magic.

In some brief, 197 pages, Prince Tchtokoua has shown a superb technique.  Like Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, it is not necessary to scribble many long books to escalate the Olympus of writing.

December 11, 2008
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