Aka Morchiladze is a widely recognised and much-loved writer from Georgia. He has authored some best-selling novels, and a series of short stories and essays mainly concerned with Georgian history and literature. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to Georgian literature.

Morchiladze has an incredible ability to tell a story and bring the reader into his world, always engaging with new themes, new areas of experience, and, above all, new technical challenges.  He tells stories from the point of view of an outsider, but he sees the world as one of  his characters might see it. He pays thorough attention to the distinctiveness of the speech of each character.  His stories with a wide variety of voices are emotional, subtle and complex, sometimes even grotesque.

His writing technique allows mixed perception of the text: a literary text can be perceived on various levels. For some readers, it could be simply a detective story. For others, a narrative full of unique historical details, the picture of a particular era. Moreover, it could be the contemplation of the differences between past and present, the relationship and interdependence of history and memory, history and mentality, and their roles in culture. In manipulating a continuous parallel between past and present, modernity and antiquity, he uses stories and themes from Classical literature and places them in a modern context and circumstances.

Morchiladze has won a number of literary prizes in Georgia. His works have been translated and published in several countries, including Germany, Italy, Serbia, Mexico, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Egypt, USA, Sweden, Azerbaijan and Switzerland. 

His two novels, Journey to Karabakh and Of Old Hearts and Swords, have been translated into English by Elizabeth Heighway.  

His first novel, Journey to Karabakh (მოგზაურობა ყარაბაღში), was published in Georgia in 1992 and brought him immediate success. The novel depicts events in Georgia and the Caucasus, which took place at the beginning of the 1990s. It tells of an adventure of two young Georgians who accidentally get involved in the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Cover of Elizabeth Heighway's translation of Journey to Karabakh. H.2016/.7513

Of Old Hearts and Swords (ძველი გულებისა და ხმლისა) was published in 2007. It is a novel about nineteenth-century Georgia, re-creating the atmosphere of a culture almost lost in time. Its themes are loyalty and courage, love, friendship and war. It narrates the story of a Georgian nobleman who travels from Tbilisi to the West in search of his missing brother.

 

Cover Of Old Hearts and Swords in Georgian. YF.2008.a.20364

Morchiladze’s work Georgian Notebooks (ქართულის რვეულები) (2013) has recently been translated into English. It was published in 2022 with the title Character in Georgia. The book is a collection of stories about poets, politicians, outlaws and many other Georgians. Their personalities are different, and yet, symbolising Georgian character, they have something in common. Living in the pages of this book, they follow their unique way of behaving. Their inner lives collide with real events and become the stuff of history and legend.

The English edition (Character in Georgia), unlike the Georgian original, provides more information and context around the events and people, presenting and explaining stories for non-Georgian readers. This new approach to the original text was suggested by the English editor, Peter Nasmyth. It was finally decided to put both writers’ names on the title page.

 

Cover of Character in Georgia (awaiting shelfmark)

The British Library’s collections hold most of Morchiladze’s works, including his best novels mentioned above, as well as English translations. On several occasions, he has been invited to the British Library as a speaker and talked about Georgian literature. We look forward to seeing him at a future European Writers' Festival.

Anna Chelidze, Curator, Georgian Collections

References:

Donald Rayfield, Georgian literature in Encyclopædia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/art/Georgian-literature/The-20th-century 

Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: History (London: Garnett Press, 2010). 

The Endangered Archives Programme project on Bulgarian minorities’ culture in the 20th century has created a digital archive which documents the traditions and customs of minority communities in Bulgaria.

Karakachan family in front of their 'Kaliva' thatched winter cabins in Karnobat region, Bulgaria. 1950. EAP500/1/1/2.

The objective of the project was to improve the accessibility and exposure of this digital archive to a wider audience of researchers and stakeholders.

A Tatar-Turkish family celebrates the national holiday May Day in pre-1989 Bulgaria on the 1st of May in their village of Vardim, located in the Svishtov region in 1957. Their daughter, looking on and dressed as a young pioneer in a red scarf, represents a new generation of Bulgarian people. EAP500/13/3/1.

The project focused on various ethnic and religious communities in Bulgaria, including Turks, Tatars, Pomaks, Jews, Armenians, Old Believers, Alevis, Aromanians, Karakachans, and Vlachs. This project continues the work initiated in the previous project, which was smaller in its scope.

Turkish families celebrate the holiday of ‘Trifon Zarezan’, also known as the holiday of the grapes and wine. 1967. EAP500/13/3/11.

The captured documents serve as valuable sources of information regarding the cultures and traditions of the Bulgarian minority communities, which were often obscure beyond the confines of their respective regions.

Turkish women during grape harvest in the village of Novgrad (mixed Bulgarian-Turkish village) in Svishtov region. 1963. EAP500/13/3/17.

The project’s investigations have uncovered these images in private and local government collections. The project established that local archives didn’t hold these types of records. This deficiency primarily stemmed from the mono-centric state policy, which historically prioritised Bulgarian ethnic tradition and culture to the exclusion of minority groups.

Traditional Turkish dresses presented by Turkish women part of the Turkish group ‘Berlik’. 1950s. EAP500/13/3/122.

These communities, both geographically and culturally isolated, frequently experienced marginalisation from mainstream Bulgarian society. Despite this, they continued to preserve numerous traditional elements of their culture, which are passed down through generations.

Karakachans' costumes in everyday life and festive tradition in Karnobat region, Southeast Bulgaria, during the 1950s through to the 1980s period. EAP500/3/1.

The project has surveyed underexplored and little-known aspects of the lifestyles, customs, and rituals of minority groups in Bulgaria. Many of these elements hold significant research value as they retain pre-industrial characteristics, often maintained and practised clandestinely during the socialist era in Bulgaria.

The photo presents Armenian tobacco workers from Haskovo city. 1930. EAP675/9/1/25.

Russian Old Believers and their guests from Romania in Kazashko village. 1950s. EAP675/26/1/45.

Alevi dancers in traditional costumes from Yablanovo village. 1970s. EAP675/1/1/13.

The geographic and cultural isolation experienced by these groups, who remained largely unaffected by modern influences, often resulted in their exclusion from mainstream Bulgarian society. Regardless of this, these communities diligently preserved numerous traditional elements of their culture, which have persistently endured and been passed down from one generation to the next.

In Medovets, a Turkish wedding unfolds as the bride and groom patiently await at the table to receive congratulations, gifts, and monetary blessings from the wedding guests. 1980s. EAP500/12/1/269.

The bride departs for her new home accompanied by her trousseau. 1970s. EAP675/7/1/49.

The project concluded that, prior to 1989, Bulgarian state policies were actively geared towards the forced assimilation of minorities. As a result, the project states, there has been a gradual erosion or deliberate destruction of photographs and photographic collections belonging to various minority communities, with a particular impact on the Muslim minority during the "Revival process" in Bulgaria from the 1960s to the 1980s.

During this period, the Bulgarian state implemented a policy of forced assimilation targeting Muslims, involving the destruction of all official, personal, and family documents verifying their minority identity. Despite these repressive measures and deliberate destruction of archival materials, the project reveals that many documents were covertly preserved, although frequently under unfavourable conditions and in a deteriorated state.

The first public Evangelical protest by Protestants from different parts and churches of Bulgaria for the free manifestation of religion and religious practices in South Park in Sofia. One placard reads: “We want the Nativity of Christ and Easter as public holidays.” 1989. EAP675/47/1/62.

The photo presents Pomak traditional women's costumes from Yagodina village at the local folklore fair. 1970s-1980s. EAP675/46/1/52.  

The project has digitised documents that serve as invaluable sources of information about the cultures and traditions of these minority communities, which often remain scarcely known beyond the confines of their respective regions. The digitised copies of the material have been deposited in the Studii Romani Archive at the Institute of Ethnology and Folkloristic Studies and the Ethnographical Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. The British Library also holds a digital copy of this valuable material.

Milan Grba, Lead Curator South-East European Collections

Ismail Kadare, the best-known contemporary Albanian writer and intellectual, one of the most remarkable European authors of his generation, died on 1 July 2024 at the age of 88.

Ismail Kadare (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

By coincidence, the news about Kadare’s death came when I was reading his novel Broken April (1978) about the moral responsibilities of intellectuals: “Your books, your art, they all smell of murder [...] you look here for beauty so as to deed your art. You don’t see that this is beauty that kills [...]”.

Cover of Ismail Kadare's Broken April (London, 1990) Nov.1990/1482

Kadare’s body of work consists of over 80 titles translated into 45 languages. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 15 times and received numerous awards. However, my personal encounter with the author happened quite late in my life. I learned about him first in 2016 from the blog post by Christina Pribichevich Zorić, the former Chief of Conference and Language Services at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. But it was not until I got stuck for over six hours at Tirana International Airport, waiting for my flight to London and having plenty of time to read, that I finally had a chance to savour the mastery of his literary genres, narratives, themes and literary devices. The range of his works available in all major European languages at a small airport bookshop was impressive, and I ended up buying several of his books.

All of Kadare’s novels create imaginary worlds out of a wide variety of myths, legends (The Three Arched Bridge), and stories of the distant past (The Castle). He worked with political parables and satire (The Concert), antitotalitarian dystopias (The Palace of Dreams), offering commentary on the recent history (The General of the Dead Army, Broken April) and openly criticising Hoxha’s dictatorship and the regime that immediately succeeded it (Agamemnon's Daughter, The Successor). Having studied in the Soviet Union just before Albania's breaking of political and economic ties with the USSR, Kadare wrote a book of memoirs about his time in Moscow in the late 1950s in the style of political satire (Twilight of the Eastern Gods). His last novel, The Doll (2015, English translation – 2020), is also a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story. Whenever he wrote, he would always write about his beloved Albania. As he put it in one of his poems: “Me ka marre malli per Shqiperine tone” (“I was filled with longing for Albania”, translated by Robert Elsie).

Kadare, like the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha 28 years before him, was born in the museum-like town of Gjirokastër. Looking at the photo below, it is strange to think how Good and Evil could come from one place.

The city of Gjirokastër in Albania (Photograph by Katya Rogatchevskaia)

The earliest book by Kadare that I found in the British Library collections was his poem The Princess Argjiro, published first in Tirana in 1958 and later in 1967.

Cover of Princesha Argjiro. (Tirana, 1967). Shelfmark X.950/15359

Page from Princesha Argjiro by Ismail Kadare

Based on a 15th-century local legend, the poem tells the story of a young princess who jumped with her child off the walls of the Gjirokastër Castle to avoid captivity by the Ottomans. As the spirit and message of the poem were not in line with the conventions of socialist realism and the Communist Party of Albania’s interpretation of the country’s history, the work was denounced, and Kadare was criticised for not following socialist literary principles.

The Gjirokastër Castle (Photograph by Katya Rogatchevskaia)

But this was only the beginning of Kadare’s opposition to the political and aesthetic tenets of the Albanian dictatorship. Influenced by Kafka, Gogol, Sartre, Camus, Orwell and other writers and thinkers, he kept writing books that were banned, criticised and censored, while the author himself was once nearly shot. His international fame saved him many times, but even after Hoxha’s death, he had to flee from Albania and seek refuge in France in 1990 after criticising the new government. He later returned to Tirana and continued writing. Like Vaclav Havel, Kadare was invited by his people to become president, but unlike Havel, he declined.

The search on Kadare as an ‘author’ yields 257 entries in the British Library catalogue – we hold his books in Albanian, English, French, German, Bulgarian, Polish, Dutch, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and even Arabic.

Whether you are a devoted admirer of Kadare’s work or you are just at the beginning of your journey into his wonderful but challenging world, I would like to leave you with the author's reading of his 1961 poem Edhe Kur Kujtesa (And when my memory).

Ndarja erdhi,
Po iki larg prej teje.
Asgjë e jashtëzakonshme,
Veç ndonjë natë
Gishtat e dikujt do pleksen në flokët e tu
Me të largëtit gishtat e mi, me kilometra të gjatë.

The division came
I'm leaving you ...
Nothing extraordinary,
Except for one night
Someone's fingers will curl into your hair
With my fingers far, miles long ...

C'est l'heure de se séparer.
Je vais m'en aller loin de toi.
Rien là qui puisse étonner.
Pourtant, une autre nuit, les doigts
d'un autre dans tes cheveux viendront
s'entrelacer aux miens, mes doigts
de milliers de kilomètres de long.

Anthology of Modern Albanian Poetry, edited and translated by Robert Elsie (London: Forest Books, 1996)

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator, East European Collections

Further reading:

Ismail Kadare obituary. The Guardian, 1 July 2024 

Peter Morgan. Ismail Kadare: the writer and the dictatorship, 1957-1990. (London, 2010) YC.2011.b.13

Ariane Eissen. Visages d'Ismail Kadaré. (Paris, [2015]) YF.2021.a.16497

Alessandro Scarsella, Giuseppina Turano. Leggere Kadare : critica, ricezione, bibliografia. (Milan, 2008) YF.2015.a.12980

Kadare dhe regjimi komunist : 101 dokumente nga aparati diktatorial shtetëror 1959-1991, compiled by Dashnor Kaloçi. (Tirana, 2018) YF.2021.a.11094