Guram Odisharia (I) — The President's Cat
Miriane (Guram) Odisharia (1951–) is a renowned Georgian poet, prose writer, playwright, and public figure, born in Sukhumi and displaced to Tbilisi by the Georgian-Abkhazian war of 1992-3. He was the Georgian Minister of Culture and Monument Protection between the years of 2012 and 2014, and is recognized as an expert in conflict and peace transformation in the Caucuses. He has written widely about his own experiences of conflict and dislocation, and his work has been translated into languages including English, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Armenian, and Italian. His work often explores themes of nostalgia, loss, the concept of home, dislocation, survival, and self, before, during and after experiences of violence and war. Literary scholars note that the Black Sea is a significant source of inspiration for Odisharia, functioning as a personified force or conceptual plain against which the historical, political, cultural, and personal may be brought into focus.
His novel The President's Cat paints a vivid picture of Sukhumi, a once-exotic city-resort marred by the horrors of the Georgian-Abkhaz war.
Excerpt:
He opened both the blinds on one window. Then on the other window, too. The office was pervaded by the warm cool of the winter sea.
It was January 1962. Or, more precisely, January 13. By then, He was already on friendly terms with the number 13. Earlier it had somehow set him on edge.
A day earlier, he had left the city in quite a different state, pacified and content. But on the thirteenth, the sun had come out early in the morning and the white, white snow sparkled even more brightly. The blue sky gleamed still bluer because of the snow, the snow was even more blinding, even the sun's rays were excessively, simply quite cosmetically, pink, also because of the sea, the snow, and the sun itself.
Incidentally, it is because of this blue and their rich green and pink colours that seaside towns resemble beautiful women. And not just beautiful women, but women in general, especially when these and other colours are supplemented by that of freshly fallen snow.
I don't just like snow-covered seaside towns—I love them. In these towns, the briefest moments blend with one another, the whole world shrinks and becomes so endearing, and people look stranger than strange, intoxicated by their populous loneliness.
Explanation:Georgian author Guram Odisharia’s The President’s Cat (2007) materializes the littoral location as a site where natural and human realms collide. It reflects the winter coast as a location of profound, almost erotic, feminine beauty, as well as tranquil peace and isolation. It would appear that the seaside town of Sukhumi is somehow untouched by the inland world: a context outside of time, running on its own distinctive clock. Here, “the briefest moments blend with one another, [and] the whole world shrinks and becomes so endearing…”
Citation: Odisharia, Guram. 2008. The President's Cat in Two Novels from the Caucasus (Central Asian Literatures in Translation, 2024). Academic Press Studies. Trans. by Felix Helbing. 62.