The Prose of the Mountains

The Prose of the Mountains contains three tales of the Caucasus by Aleksandre Qazbegi, one of the most prescient and gifted chroniclers of the Georgian encounter with colonial modernity. His stories offer an invaluable counterpoint to the predominantly Russian narratives that have hitherto shaped scholarly accounts of the nineteenth-century Caucasus. “Memoirs of a Shepherd” poignantly chronicles the young author’s decision to pass seven years of his life as a shepherd with Georgian mountaineers. “Eliso” (the name of a Chechen girl) offers one of the most searing accounts on record of the forced migration of this people from their homeland to Ottoman lands. Set in the sixteenth century, “Khevis Beri Gocha” (the name of a Georgian village chief) classically chronicles a tragic misunderstanding between a severe father and his loving son.

Aleksandre Qazbegi was born into aristocratic privilege. Yet, instead of enjoying the life his high birth could have afforded him, he chose a life of deliberate poverty, first in the mountains where he was born, and where he lived as a shepherd for seven years, and subsequently in Tbilisi. As he crafted a fresh literary style for a new readerly demographic, Qazbegi became Georgia’s first professional writer. He died at the age of forty-five in an insane asylum in Tbilisi.