Guram Rcheulishvili: A Georgian Hemingway?

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway's works are often interpreted in the context of his biography as Hemingway stressed the significance of his own experiencefor his fiction. He explained it, “In order to write about life first you must live it” (Ernest Hemingway on Writing, 2004). The same rhetoric of thenexus of “life” and fiction is used by Guram Rcheulishvili (1934-1660) who obviously followed Hemingway’s notions of literature. Rcheulishvili’sshort fiction is a reply to Hemingway’s iconic writing style creatively worked into the Georgian literary tradition. The aim of this paper is to analyzeimportant parallels between the short stories of Ernest Hemingway and Guram Rcheulishvili to demonstrate this relationship. The use of everydaylanguage as well as short and simple sentences, a concise and sparse style, repetitions, intense dialogues are some of the essential traitscharacteristic to both writers. Themes like birth and death, war and violence, family, nature, disillusionment prove to be vitally important in theirshort stories. One of the significant similarities is also that both Hemingway and Rcheulishvili “place” their work mainly in “their time” so familiarto each of them. They both try to write what they know well about and doing so, they do not often employ the first-person narration(or, at least, as frequently as one could expect). Complex interconnections between the author, the narrator and the protagonist (oftenautobiographical) is another interesting subject to study in the short stories of both Ernest Hemingway and Guram Rcheulishvili.Keywords: Hemingway, Rcheulishvili, short fiction