Late, or the life of Richard Dubrovsky. Gelbach I.

In the unfinished opera Nico Sulkhanishvili, “Little Kakhetin,” there is Aria Pastuha, who is lamenting that he was late for the battle with the Persians near Kritsanisi. In that fatal battle of 1795, the army of Tsar Irakli II was defeated, and Tbilisi was destroyed. "My path is confused... who am I, and who is my shepherd?" - the shepherd asks.

Igor Gelbach also calls the heroes of his novel “late”: having fallen into the millstones of history, they are desperately eager to fight in the hope of at least somehow influencing the outcome of the battle, but all the time they are late-history invites them to witnesses already accomplished victories and defeats, offering only to choose the side. But they are not late by evil will, but because their paths are too confusing. The author carries the reader in the intricacies of fate, events, cultures, the times in which Richard Dubrovsky was forced to part with the NKVD intelligence by his father and mother, but, unable to resist the unable voice of the past, almost forty years later went in search of them...