Zaal Andronikashvili: »Das Land, das die Literatur sehr liebte«. Ein Streifzug durch die georgische Gegenwartsliteratur

Georgia is a small country with about 4 million people and an old literary tradition dating back to the 5th century. For the first time, the Frankfurt Book Fair will make this literature accessible to the German reading public in its entirety.

In Guram Dotschanashvili's story »The man who loved literature very much« (1973), the main protagonist claims that every narrative makes a person better, his life richer and reconciles him with death. If Walter Benjamin's statement about the narrator is extended to literature as a whole, then all literature is about sharing experience. The contemporary Georgian authors have shared with German readers the experiences of a highly traumatized transformation society in search of the new order, the new place in the world and the new social conditions in the geographical East of Europe. Despite all this, a fundamentally life-affirming attitude remains characteristic of contemporary Georgian literature. This experience is clothed in literary forms that tie in with the traditions of Georgian literature, but also further develop them.

Zaal Andronikashvili is a Literary scholar and academic coordinator of the project Batumi, Odessa, Trabzon. The Cultural Semantics of the Black Sea from the Perspective of Eastern Port Cities.

see also ZfL Research on Georgia