"A cut-off chunk", or Multiculturalism in the works of Alexander Ebanoidze

Part of the Soviet era fiction was works of writers that combined traditions of different cultures and national literatures. The practice of modern humanities research defines such works as multicultural. The works of Alexander Ebanoidze are a representative example of multicultural fiction, integrating the experience of the native Georgian culture and the Russian culture. The analysis of his novels shows a change in the identity of the writer and in the orientation of his poetics from works of the Soviet period, which conceptualized the Russian-Georgian relations through the capital vs province category, to post-Soviet works, in which two cultural worlds, equally "native" for the author, are isolated and confronted. Brakpo-imeretinski [Marriage in Imereti] (1977), ideologically close to the prose of the village writers, expressed the artistic reflection on the fate of the Georgian village in the era of big cities. The clash of the patriarchal tradition and the modern individual choice the novel is based on the motifs of the closed nature of villagers that rejects outsiders. In the novel ... Gde ottchiy dom [. . . Where the paternal house is] (1982), A. Ebanoidze draws the situation of the real decline of the rural idyll, which indicates the loss of roots, not a potential threat to it. The change in the writer's thematic paradigm was influenced by the events of the late 1980s - early 1990s which led to the collapse of the USSR. The desire to develop his view, different from the points of view of both Georgian nationalism and the Empire supporters, was reflected in A. Ebanoidze's first post-Soviet novel Nyne otpustchaeshy [Nunc Dimit-tis] (1994-1996). His character Lavrentiy Oboladze perceives what is happening as an observer, which is determined by his role of a journalist and by mentality alienated from the politics aggressively advancing towards him. He prefers to give the characters a chance to speak themselves, they conceptualize what is happening in their own way. The novel "polyphony" includes a vision of the older and younger generations, opinions of townspeople and villagers, the Georgians and the Russians, reference to the heroes of the Soviet (Beria) history and of the present (Zviad Gamsakhurdia). Over the years, the prose of Ebanoidze has fewer mentions of Georgia, which is explained by the growing distancing of the cultures and the exhaustion of the nationalist theme for the writer. In the "Moscow" novel Predtchuvstviye okt'abrya [Premonition of October] (2012), Georgia is represented only indirectly, in the person of the writer Guram Avaliani who generally speaks about the historical and cultural trauma of the nations that faced the might of the Empire.

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