The Gospel According to Chegem

by Fazil Iskander

English, Russian (translation)

407 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Fazil Abdulovich Iskander, also known in Russian as Фазиль Искандер, arguably the most famous Abkhaz writer, renowned in the former Soviet Union for his vivid descriptions, mostly written in Russian, of Caucasian life. He has written various stories, most famously "Zashita Chika", which star a crafty and likable young boy named "Chik".

The most famous intellectual of Abkhazia, he distanced himself from the Abkhaz secessionist strivings in the late 1980s and criticised both Georgian and Abkhaz communities of Abkhazia for their ethnic prejudices. He warned that Abkhazia could become a new Nagorno-Karabakh.

He was probably best known in the English speaking world for Sandro of Chegem, a picaresque novel that recounts life in a fictional Abkhaz village from the early years of the 20th century until the 1970s, which evoked praise for the author as "an Abkhazian Mark Twain." Mr. Iskander's humor, like Mark Twain's, has a tendency to sneak up on you instead of hitting you over the head. This rambling, amusing and ironic work has been considered as an example of magic realism, although Iskander himself said he "did not care for Latin American magic realism in general". A section of the novel dealing with Sandro's encounter with Joseph Stalin was made into the Russian film Baltazar's Feasts, or a Night with Stalin in 1989.

Iskander lived in Moscow and was a writer for the newspaper Kultura.

Reviews

[Mariangel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second volume of stories about Chegem and its people, with Uncle Sandro as the thread. My favorite was 'The abduction', where Uncle Sandro convinces the bridegroom to switch girls during the ritual abduction in order to marry his bride, using a ruse that turns up to be true; how Kyazym caught the thief who was stealing from the kolkhos' safe, and the memories The Tree of Childhood. Other stories are more rambling and disconnected, and one is quite brutal.

There is a chapter which is an extended version of the well known fairy tale of Baron Munchausen and his companions with astonishing powers (two shorter versions of this story can be found also in the The Yellow Fairy Book).

The book describes the simple village life and its people with fondness and with very good insights into man's character. Many sentences are worth quoting.

[J. McClain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Sandro of Chegem is staying my favorite of the Iskander books so far, this is an excellent reprise to that fantastic set of stories.