The Real Story of My Life: Sapo Mgeladze

Sapo Mgeladze’s “The Real Story of My Life” is a truly important text in many ways. It is elusive in genre, but it intersects between documentary prose and memoir, with elements of a diary, and is unequivocally the “key to the writer’s biography and creativity” (Kupreishvili, 2023). At the same time, the era, the fate of a person and an artist in a repressive state, the multiple layers of gender and power relations. The relationship between the narrative of the text and the historical context in which it was created are read with particular intensity here.

We will, of course, never know to what extent Sapo herself thought it possible to bring these texts to light during her own lifetime. However, upon reading “The Real Story of My Life,” it becomes clear that for the writer this was a kind of alternative and, one might say, a counter-reaction – to tell the story of the structural injustice, the visible and invisible oppression and marginalization that she experienced as a female artist. And she unequivocally wanted to share this with the readers: “When time comes, they will read these books, these diaries, these letters, these poems. At least one in a million will understand me and say that a righteous person perished and that this ought never to be repeated.”

This is an unambiguously feminist text, where the author herself chooses to tell her own story; This is a primary, authentic narrative, where anger, rage, despair, and pain are all out in the open.

Sapo’s mental and physical condition was grave while writing “The Real Story of My Life” (she was suffering from tuberculosis and had severe depressive episodes). Nevertheless, the author truly has both the desire and the ability to have control over herself and, most importantly, over her own creative work. It is through writing precisely that she tries to gain power over her own life, biography, and texts. In “The Real Story of My Life”, she herself becomes the real protagonist of her own life, the center of her own world. This way, once again, she fiercely confronts patriarchy and totalitarianism and the most intense embodiment of these two monsters opposing them – the Union of Soviet Writers of Georgia.

Tamta Melashvili