The Drought by Aleksandre Kutateli: Religion, Revolution and Power in the Arena of Apocalyptic Expectations

Abstract

The Drought (1927), a short story by Georgian writer Aleksandre Kutateli (1898-1982), draws a picture of a region of Georgia at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the country was part of the Russian Empire and revolutionary unrest was just beginning to stir.
The story describes (the last, enlarged version of the short story was published in 1974) a Georgian village where drought and an epidemic are raging, ruthlessly destroying plants, animals and people alike. Such a state of affairs inspires apocalyptic fears and feelings among the village residents.
The characters in the story fall under two categories: those with religious sentiments and apocalyptic expectations, on the one hand, and those with a revolutionary spirit, who plan to change the existing circumstances and are to establish a new political order, on the other. As the epilogue of the story notes, it is the young revolutionary forces that achieve victory when the communist government is already established in the country.
One of the protagonists of the story is an archpriest named Iakob Pkhakadze, a well-educated clergyman with no personal belief, who uses the religious feelings of the others in order to gain power and influence. This character seems to understand religion in the same way as the Grand Inquisitor from the novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
did. It seems plausible to suggest that Kutateli, while perceiving Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor and creating his own image of archpriest Pkhakadze, was inspired by the work of Vasily Rozanov (1856-1919), namely The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor by F. M. Dostoevsky (1894), as this book had a notable impact on the twentieth-century modernist writers in general, and on the Georgian modernists in particular.