A hundred and
ten years ago in June 1901 after holidaying in Tbilisi for three weeks, a
beautiful aristocratic Norwegian woman, Dagny Juel Przybyszewska, dies in her
hotel room. It was just after lunch; she was fully clothed; a bullet entered
the back of her head; she was 33 years old. That we know. We know little about
the true events of that day, or indeed of Dagny herself. Her fellow Norwegian
and artist, Edward Munch, who painted Scream,
said of Dagny, “You had to experience her to be able to describe her.” Those
that did describe her called her “the Queen of Berlin bohemia” in the 1890s.
Tbilisi, a
hundred years ago, was in Russia (now Georgia), a cosmopolitan place – “a sort
of small, modest Tower of Babel.” Dagny arrives by train from Berlin with her five-year-old
son, Zenon (leaving her daughter behind), her ex-lover and French-Polish poet,
Wincent Brzozowski, and her current companion, Wladyslaw Emeryk, a wealthy
Polish businessman. Her husband Stanislaw (Stach), a talented Polish writer, whom
she had left a year earlier, would join them in Tbilisi. Surely this
combination of men in her life – son, ex-husband, ex-lover, and current lover,
could not be a good omen.
The story of
Dagny and what happened that fateful day is interspersed with another story,
that of the Love Feast – the Agape, a half-religious, half-artistic event. Here
the author “explores” literature, arts, and politics from a heady mixture of
Shamanistic Art, Gnosticism, the linguistics of the Georgian language, Bach’s Art of the Fugue, magic, eroticism and
culture – in an effort to determine the definition of love and death – “Love is
as strong as Death.” Introducing real people of the day (such as a young Joseph
Stalin who lives in Gori, near Tbilisi, and the Georgian poets Shota Rustaveli
and Vazha-Pshavela) and fictitious characters, Karumidze shifts from themes to
theories in his love feast, his “evolving involution of Love.”
The “novel”
(for it is not a conventional novel) is sometimes colloquial – as if the author
is sitting next to the reader explaining his thoughts and moods – and sometimes
academic with footnotes on his sources and further readings. Readers may prefer
one style over the other, although the average reader may be distracted and confused
by the clash of narratives and stories. I would have preferred a more detailed
investigation of Dagny in a fictional style, even with supposition and
surmises, for a more fluid, suspenseful tale.
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