★★★★☆
Aka Morchiladze’s 2007 novel of chivalry and brotherhood is set in a divided Georgia just on the cusp of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829.
Perhaps best known in English for his debut novel Journey to Karabakh (1992), Aka Morchiladze (the pen name of Giorgi Akhvlediani) is one of Georgia’s most prolific contemporary authors.
Like his other works, this most recent re-publication of Of Old Hearts and Sword (2007) in English is characterised by its easy-to-read text, featuring short chapters which follow several narratives that ultimately combine in a tragic ending.
The novel opens in Tbilisi in the spring of 1828, just as the young Georgian nobleman Baduna Pavneli is being released from Russian military barracks after being detained for killing a Russian officer. Due to his rank and family connections, he has been sentenced to 10 years of exile in his home village. When he learns that his younger brother Tadia, a mute with the tendency to wander off towards the sun, has gone missing, he embarks on a journey across Georgia to retrieve him.
Dogging his steps are Russian soldiers, following him on the orders of Tbilisi’s Russian colonel who mistakenly believes Baduna is in love with his daughter and planning a bride-kidnapping.
Throughout the novel, the colonel acts entirely on the basis of Russian stereotypes, including typecasting the Georgian man as the consummate seducer:
‘It was true that Baduna Pavneli did not even speak Russian, let alone French, but what need did such infatuation have for a common language. The eyes alone would have been enough; a well-groomed moustache and the deep, dreamy, perfidious eyes of the Georgian male’.
The colonel shows no trust for any of the Georgians employed by the military, despite their consistent loyalty, and spends his time constantly working himself up into a panic over the outrageous plans he is sure Baduna will carry out. Through this characterisation, Morchiladze pushes back against the classic historical myth of the Russian Empire as a saviour of Georgia, while at the same time poking fun at some of the most famous 19th-century Russian novels about the Caucasus, which have often centred on the region’s romantic mythos.
While the cat-and-mouse game plays out, a second narrative takes place in Poti, then a small village on Georgia’s Black Sea coast. The Pasha of Batomi (or Batumi, then-under Ottoman control) is planning a trip to Constantinople and wishes to bring a slave as a gift — to do so, he turns to his elderly flag-bearer Aziz-Bey, a former slave trader, to kidnap a woman from Georgia.
The final and third narrative that ties the entire story together is the kidnapping of Maiko, Baduna and Tadia’s mother, years earlier.
While bride-kidnapping is a recurrent theme underpinning the novel, Morchiladze’s main characters are all men. The text focuses almost solely on the fears of men, that their wives or daughters may be stolen, or the effects of this loss on the sons and husbands left behind. Yet Morchiladze does not entirely ignore the women at the heart of it all. Instead, he uses the silence he himself has created to explore the lack of choice women of the era had in their futures.
At just over 180 pages, Of Old Hearts and Sword is a relatively short novel; its easily accessible text makes for a faster read as well. Yet, Morchiladze does not skimp on world-building, fully portraying the many politics at work throughout east and west Georgia at the time, as well as depicting the variety of different cultural contexts one could encounter, from thriving Jewish quarters to Molokan villages of Old Believers. For readers who want a thrilling novel while also learning a bit more about the Russian conquest of the Caucasus from a Georgian perspective, this novel is sure to please.
Book details: Of Old Hearts and Sword (2007) by Aka Morchiladze, translated into English by Elizabeth Heighway in 2017 and published by Sulakauri Publishing in 2025. Buy it from the publisher here.