Listed in

As the title suggests, there are two contrasting stories unfolding in this novel: One is of the Norwegian poetess and dramatist Dagny Juel (1867-1901) – a beautiful, artistic, creative woman, whose errant life brings her to a totally foreign country, where she dies falling victim to deranged male fantasies. Dagny Juel was an inspiration to such celebrities as Edward Munch, August Strindberg, Gustav Vigeland, and was the ‘Queen’ of Berlin bohemia in1890s. The other story is a phantasmagoric mixture of religious mysticism and eroticism, mythic origins of arts and politics. It is a play with various cultural themes, both primitive and highly developed, traversing such extremes as Shamanic Art and Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Gnosticism and Modernist esthetics, Magic and Linguistics… This mix of themes and ideas is rendered in a story of a so called Agape – the Love Feast – a half-religious half-artistic event. . The topos where the Love Feast interacts/intersects with reality is a city of limitless feasting and wine-crazed discussion — Tiflis. Some of the characters of the novel are historical – the young Joseph Stalin, his terrorist friend Camo, a visionary and guru George Gurjieff, a Georgian poet Vazha Pshavela, a primitivist Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani, August Strindberg, and others. In other cases, made-up characters like Gornahor, a raven-like creature from planet Saturn, are introduced, as are several concepts, many adapted from Gurjieff’s autobiographical and cosmological writings.

Source: Goodreads