May 3, 1893

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia (კონსტანტინე გამსახურდია) (May 3, 1893 to July 17, 1975) was a Georgian novelist during the Soviet era, and he managed to survive. He is now considered one of the leading novelists of 20th century Georgia. His work has not been translated into English, and we rely on The Literature of Georgia: A History, (Donald Rayfield, 2000), for our story. 

And that story is Gamsakhurdia survived, survived, arrest, and exile, and the jungle world of totalitarian society He survived to the point that Rayfield says"Gamsakhurdia in his wit, courage, and cunning, was a figure of considerable stature." This was during the period of the purges. The thirties was an era that left a smaller Georgian intelligentsia, and elsewhere the slaughter was such that we now refer to a genocide. And yet Gamsakhurdia was not among those killed. You might think he cooperated with the secret police, and I am not sure about the status of those records now which might answer the question (In Bulgaria for instance, many of those records vanished after the break-up of the Soviet Union.) But Rayfield says Gamsakhurdia did not betray his friends. "Beria's public critique of Gamsakhurdia was balanced by some private understanding of which we still know very little." Rayfield points out they were both from the same western Georgian province of Mingrelia. 

One reason this is a mystery, is that Lavrenti Beria was the ignorant and bloodthirsty head of Stalin's secret police. Beria, supposedly the author of History of the Bolshevik Party in the Caucasus (first presented in 1935) actually had it ghostwritten. And yet Beria seems to have been attracted to artists. Which hardly fits the profile of one who preferred to kill face to face, with his own revolver, enemies of the state. Rayfield points out that most officials would rather sign the warrants and let others do the killing. Not Beria. Rayfield says: "unlike most of the Kremlin leadership, Beria was a cat that liked to live with mice."

Gamsakhurdia survived as a man of honor. But how did he survive as an artist? How did the mouse establish a literary reputation which has survived?  His novels were set in long ago historical eras.  David the Builder , (written between 1942 and 1962) was about a venerated medieval king, who lived from  1089 AD to 1125.  This was not a novel technique for writing novels in such circumstances.