Donald Rayfield

Edited and translated by Donald Rayfield.

This is a comprehensive history of Georgia focusing not only on the post-Soviet era but on the full sweep of its turbulent past. The book describes Georgia's complex struggles with the many empires which have tried to control, fragment or even exterminate the country.

In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. Sketches of the Criminal World is the second of two volumes (the first, Kolyma Stories, was published by NYRB Classics in 2018) that together constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. In this second volume, Shalamov sets out to answer the fundamental moral questions that plagued him in the camps where he encountered firsthand the criminal world as a real place, far more evil than Dostoyevsky's underground: "How does someone stop being human?" and "How are criminals made?" By 1972, when he was writing his last stories, the camps were being demolished, the guard towers and barracks razed. "Did we exist?" Shalamov asks, then answers without hesitation, "I reply, 'We did.'"

"Of all Russian writers, Chekhov is one of the best liked and most easily appreciated. Yet because his work is subtle and understated, we need help to understand him. Chekhov can be (as his friends complained) the most elusive of writers, and one who appears capable of having two opposite views and opposite intentions simultaneously."--BOOK JACKET. "Donald Rayfield, one of the world's foremost Chekhov scholars, reveals the layers of meaning on which the stories and plays are built. All Chekhov's important works are studied: we see how closely the two genres are connected and gain insight into Chekhov's rapid development over his brief twenty years of creative life, from medical student supplementing his income by writing comic stories, to father of twentieth-century drama and narrative prose."--BOOK JACKET.

Early thirteenth-century Georgian had as many speakers and readers as English in Shakespeare's day, and medieval Georgian literature is important in terms of world cultural history, representing a bridge between classical and oriental worlds. Donald Rayfield analyses the literature in the context of Greek, Persian, and Russian influences, and presents its hitherto overlooked, rich and unique artistry. In 1225 the Mongols broke up the Georgian state and crippled its culture: Rayfield describes the dormancy of literature until an eighteenth-century Renaissance, and the subsequent flourishing artistry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when, under the auspices of symbolism and futurism, Georgian poetry and prose achieved real originality. The world-class poetry of Vazha Pshavela, Galaktion Tabidze, and Paolo Iashvili is discussed here, as are the Soviet period novelists Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, Grigol Robakidze, and Mikheil Javakhishvili, writer of the much acclaimed Kvachi Kvachantiradze. The History ends with a study of living writers, the novelists Otar Chiladze and Chabua Amirejibi, and poets such as Ana Kalandadze and Lia Sturua. A major contribution to an area of growing interest, this concise but thorough history combines clarity and accessibility for the non-specialist, with a wide breadth of cultural reference. This is the first comprehensive and objective history of the literature of Georgia to be written in any language. The literature is revealed to be unique among that of the former Russian empire in its combination of quality and length of literary tradition. Beginning with the first, overwhelmingly religious texts of the fifth century, Donald Rayfield charts the development of Georgian literature under Byzantine tutelage to the 'golden age' of medieval literature, which culminated in Rustaveli's great poetic work The Knight in the Panther's Skin. The second half of the work deals with the diverse literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. .