The gang moves to St Petersburg, where he has more trouble with women, almost raping a young woman who resists his charms.

The setting and the tumultuous times – leading through the First World War, the Russian Revolution and civil war, and the early Soviet Union period – aren't entirely unfamiliar, as numerous Russian and the Soviet authors of the period chronicled these in often similarly outrageous stories and novels, but the Georgian angle adds a less familiar perspective – and Javakhishvili (who would be executed under Stalin's regime in 1937) puts his own entertaining spin on all this.

Opportunities for fleecing folks, too: among Kvachi's greatest talents is that of conning people – he's a natural --, and here too a locale that isn't quite as incestuous as Georgia, where everyone seems to know everyone, proves advantageous.

After some youthful cons back home, Kvachi does have a go of sorts at taking the traditional route, beginning his studies – law – in Odessa.

Soon enough, Kvachi is making an 'honest' living as an insurance salesman – ideal training ground, and a task for which he is well-suited: He persisted, he pestered, he pursued, he wore his victim down and, once he had marked him out, gave him no rest until he had signed him up and tied him down.He even insures his father – and has him fake his death – in an elaborate final con to fleece his own employer, once he's ready to move on.

From Odessa Kvachi heads to the Russian capital, Petersburg, where he live it up in high style; his financial wheeling and dealing make for his reputation, as one magazine puts it, of: "Our Morgan" (as in J.P.).

What others would use to fill an entire stand-alone book – such as Kvachi and his buddies convincing a bank and the police that they are filmmakers, making preparations to film a bank-robbery scene, and then using that as cover to actually rob the bank – here are just another in the very quick succession of harebrained (yet often successful) cons Kvachi pulls off.

Kvachi remains almost always focused on the next big con, with a bit of seduction and taking care of his friends and family on the side.

He befriends, of all people, an even larger-than-life figure than he is, Rasputin, whose proximity to and influence with the royals is obviously something Kvachi finds hard to resist.

"Of course, pretty much everything that Kvachi does tends to be self-serving – though adjusted for the prevailing circumstances – and so even his most heroic exploits, such as when he winds up in actual battle, just happen to put his talents in the service of both his own survival and the greater good.

Kvachi understands: But you've go to keep an eye open to join the winning side, spit on the loser, and congratulate the winner all in good time.In revolutionary Russia it can be hard to tell which side has the upper hand – "Russia has gone made", Kvachi notes – and he even shows a bit of patriotic fire.

Now we're left with one: the Moscow path, which is Red and thorny.Of course, Kvachi can adjust to almost any conditions, and the New Economic Plan of the 1920s affords him quite a few opportunities: "NEP has revived the old convenient and profitable ways".

Which at least works out for a while .....Kvachi isn't an entirely harmless rogue: he has blood on his hands – willing to resort to murder to escape prison (and, admittedly, an imminent hanging-sentence), for example – and his treatment of the women in his life is rather shocking, right down to the final arrangements he makes when most of his plans have gone bust.

His conscience doesn't seem to trouble him, and Javakhishvili seems sympathetic to the nearly-everything-goes (lack of) ethics, which makes it a bit hard to sympathize with the character.

Kvachi may be an opportunist, but as Javakhishvili repeatedly shows, idealism was in limited supply, and none of the sides particularly pure.

(Indeed, Javakhishvili did not take his own advice in his portrayal of the victorious Bolsheviks – an attitude that would come to more than haunt him, leading to his death in Stalin's purges just over a decade later.

)A nicely sweeping novel of Georgia and Russia (and, to some extent, Europe) in the first decades of the twentieth century, Kvachi has a bit of a rough feel to it: much of it originally published as separate stories, it has been fused together into a complete novel, but doesn't quite flow like it might have had it been a novel-project from the beginning.