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Timeless: a love story from the Caucasus Mountains by Nicholas Tchkotoua: book review



Timeless (2008 English edition) is the first ever internationally published novel written by a Georgian is an aristocratic love story crossing many borders: Georgia, France, Switzerland, and America. The author Nicholas Tchkotoua (1909-1984) was a prince, who died in Switzerland, but his heart is buried in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The story commences in 1897, eight years after the completion of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Prince Shota d’Iberio, after studying in Paris, returns home to Georgia where he meets a Russian princess. Written in the first person, the Prince is smitten, totally obsessed, with the tall and slender Princess Taya Rurikova.

The Prince’s love takes the reader on the Batumi-Tbilisi railway line, completed in 1883, first to the capital of Georgia and the backdrop of the Trialet Mountains, to the “splendid mansions, broad avenues and handsome parks.”  From the balmy climate of Tbilisi he takes Taya and her governess to Samegrelo by train, Zugdidi by road, and across the Inguri River on ferry to his holiday destination of Samourzakano in the Caucasus Mountains. Returning to Paris for work, after the rail trip to Batumi on the Black Sea, he travels by ship to Marseilles and takes the Marseilles-Paris Express train to the City of Light. To see Taya’s mother he takes a “quick trip” from Paris to Lausanne in Switzerland that takes him a whole day crossing half of France, entering the Jura Mountains at Pontarlier by train. This is a time of overland travel, of long hand-written letters and intermediary Messengers - when time is protracted. Yet his love is instant. He knew the minute he saw Taya that he could not lose her.

But her mother, old and dying in Switzerland, denies him her daughter’s love when she fears that his hereditary disease “will strike your children and your children’s children, perpetuating horror and death into other lives. No. You will never, never touch my Taya.”

Skating in Davos amid the beautiful Swiss Alps to recover from ill health, he collides with Teresa, an American tourist, and realizes one thing: “I understood with absolute clarity that I loved her.” But he still loved Taya. Before Teresa returns to America, the Prince tells her, “Go home and wait for me. If I ever come, I will bring you my untroubled heart or I won’t come at all.”

The novel was first published in 1949 and re-published in 2008. It’s interesting not just because it is the first ever internationally published novel written by a Georgian, but because it is based on real events and is as much a travel story as it is a love story.


MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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