Doctoral Student
Teacher of Georgian Language and Literature
Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (TSU)
Tbilisi, Georgia
ORCID: 0000-0003-4866-8870
marisimonishvili13@gmail.com

In the Miniature World of Givi Margvelashvili

Givi Margvelashvili — a writer whose fate was shaped by two tyrannical ideologies — manages, with extraordinary skill and through moral means (even if not physically), to escape dictatorship. He flees, and through this escape shatters the chains of destiny that seemed forever imposed upon him. His sanctuary is the book; his sole reality is the literary world. As a creator, he begins to construct a world, resembling the divine, building a new reality, starting everything anew and even returning the human subject to a sense of mundanity.

The writer’s psyche withstands all external hardships and adversities; with remarkable talent, he confronts alone the initially unperceived difficulties of a foreign existence. His language justifies a Heideggerian symbolic approach to the house of being, and Margvelashvili’s prose, through German phraseology, demonstrates complete literary irreconcilability with the present, contemporary reality.

Hence, he is not an author adhering to classical literary tendencies. He writes about what he wishes, in the manner he wishes. This is a rare occurrence. Freed from the strict laws of censorship, the author expects the same freedom from the reader — liberated from all clichés.

For the characters of Givi Margvelashvili, the act of reading itself brings an experience of understanding reality. In their perception, textual reality is far from the “reality” beyond the book covers; therefore, they constantly resist this fatal given and strive to alter the determined plot created for them by the dictatorial author.

 

Keywords: Givi Margvelashvili, Dictatorship, Hermeneutics, Decoding, Determined Plot