Daur Nachkebia — Shore of the Night
Daur Nachkebia (1960 –) is an Abkhazian writer renowned for his contributions to literature in both the endangered Abkhazian language and Russian. He He graduated with a degree in physics from Tbilisi State University in 1982, is a renowned author and the former Abkhazian Minister of Education from 2011-2014. His novel, Shore of Night, is set in the aftermath of the Abkhaz-Georgian war and explores themes of memory, identity, and the human cost of war.
Excerpt:
In all this, Beslan recognized something familiar, even native. As if all this had already happened to him: Maybe in a dream, or maybe in a distant past life, but it happened for sure.
This is how he had already walked along the shore, pierced by a cold wind and washed by a thin stream of rain. The smell was the same—the sea, the fish, the dark abyss. Where was he coming from then? Where was he going? Where was he rushing
off to? He couldn’t remember. But he remembered that he was not going to a warm, cozy home. Rather, he was in a hurry to keep up with the rain and wind, to walk through them as much as possible, to not arrive anywhere they seem to be waiting for you. It’s always like this: In the rain and wind. Past each other. An unfinished port. Huge logs, the dead memory of the forest, lie on the pier, ready for loading.
Near Akop’s Place, it is empty. The tables under the mighty cypress trees stand lonely and bored. Gathering in the foliage into large drops, the rain plops onto them and breaks into pieces.
The droplet world shatters into small fragments. The pier is laid with thin, narrow, partially rotten, and broken boards. The supports are rusty. The pier goes into the sea like a skeleton.
Blown by a gusty wind, Beslan reached the end of the pier. Kelasur, Sinop, Turbaza, the wooded hills above them were visible through the glass of rain pouring between them and the distant beloved shore. The return took too long. A chill gripped his soul. The warmth is leaving it. It’s leaving all the time. It cannot be stopped.
It was not possible to separate my heart into two halves—living and dead. I should tie it into a knot and move on. But for what? Where to go? Where does it end? Will it never end? Will the rain continue to pour, separating you from your beloved shore in the distance?
Abkhazian author Daur Nachkebia’s Shore of the Night (2012) explores the littoral space as a site of transition and historical reckoning. The novel navigates the aftermath of the Georgian-Abkhaz war (1992 –93) through the narrative lens of protagonists Agdur (a deceased soldier) and his old friend Beslan (a former physicist). It is a story set across fragmented temporalities – one that follows Beslan as he moves through a desolate, post-war world, supplemented by the stream-of-consciousness, war-time diary entries of Agdur in the past. The title of the novel is critical – as Agdur embodies the war-time night, Beslan is representative of the shore. Across Shore of the Night, the littoral is a distinctly nostalgic space: a site simultaneously of reflection upon the trauma and legacy of extremely recent conflict. This is a profoundly lyrical text – structured, interwoven, and inflected by the littoral water space as a site of remembrance, self-realization, and loss.
Citation: Nachkebia, Daur. Shore of the Night. 2007. Trans Felix Helbing, Two Novels from the Caucasus (Central Asian Literatures in Translation, 2024). Academic Press Studies.