A saga-novel, overtly portraying the '"Evil Empire"', its consequences and a long journey of Georgian society and culture, won the top literary award SABA for Best Novel in 2003.

[1] The story begins at the end of the 19th century, when a Russian officer seduces a Georgian shepherd’s wife: the resulting bastard, the ancestor of the novel's anti-heroes, is kept in a basket where he cannot interfere with his mother’s adultery.

The boy, Razhden Kasheli, later rapes his foster-mother, before disappearing to become a robber and murderer, returning to Georgia with the Red Army and a female tramp he has married; he becomes a killer for the Soviet authorities.

After he is murdered by a drunken Assyrian, his son Anton acts as a GPU and NKVD killer in the Great Terror of 1937-8, shooting countless victims.

Anton is a childish dreamer and, manipulated by Razhden 2nd, marries Liziko, the daughter of an unworldly writer, Elizbar.