For Understanding Davit Turdospireli's Fiction-Documentary Story "Episodes from the Lives of Young People"

Abstract

Fictional-documentary prose has acquired special relevance today, immediacy has become a priority. Accordingly, great attention is paid to the popularization of works of the documentary genre and archival-documentary material unknown to the general reading public or the scientific community.

Of particular interest are documentary-type works created by those writers or public figures whose creative work coincided with difficult historical-political events.

Given the above, we think that our interest in the documentary work of Davit Turdospireli is understandable.

Davit Turdospireli's “Episodes from the Life of Young People” is an interesting novelty of autobiographical writing. It is a collection of small prose works that are absolutely independent of each other.

The work hints at the structure of the story from the very title. It combines 38 works, each of which is titled. They introduce us to the writer's life chronologically, while at the same time creating a clear idea of ​​the writer's contemporary socio-political or cultural life.

As is known, the reflection of the fate of the family often serves as a criticism of society, era, culture, and the human race in general. In this regard, David Turdospireli's autobiographical story is no exception. While reading the work, we are reminded of Juvenal's famous sentence, which researcher Shorena Shamanadze considered a possible epigraph to the family novel as a genre: “If you want to understand the peculiarities of the human race, observe at least one house” (Shamanadze, Sh., 2023:339).

David Turdospireli's “Episodes from the Lives of Young People” is a very interesting example of an autobiographical story. It interestingly shows a number of features of the writer's contemporary historical, political, and cultural life against the backdrop of the Chkheidze family. Similar to works of the documentary genre, in this case, too, an exact chronology is preserved, chapters are titled, real events included in the story are connected with global events of the era, and the family history coincides with the history of the country. All this allows the reader to directly get acquainted with both the writer's worldview and beliefs, as well as the writer's contemporary historical era.