Amea folklor institutu

გრიგოლ რობაქიძის ,,კავკასიური ნოველები”

ლიმინალური თეორიის კონტექსტში

Grigol Robakidze’s Caucasian Short Stories in the Context of the Theory of Liminality

Zeinab Kikvidze

According to the well-known representative of French anthropology A. van Gennep, both for groups of humans and individual persons, life is isolation and re-aggregation. Each transition is characterized by three phases: isolation or separation; marginality or liminality; re-aggregation or incorporation. The second phase is particularly significant in which an individual is isolated from fixed social and/or cultural structure as that from reality. S/he is in a liminal or boundary status.

The notion of liminality in various literary texts is based upon individualistic tendencies of the conceptualization of the world, specifically, of the time and space, as a result of which an individual becomes cognizant of the idea of his/her existence, and, further lives his/her life in accordance with that idea.

In Grigol Robakidze’s writings, a liminal position of characters comprises an individual’s aspiration to approach and merge with the sacred. The subject-matter of the writer’s creative activities, as that of a whole, is a search for God. Judging from the author’s statement – “a human’s heart is a part of the mythically split god,” the leitmotif can be formulated as the following: human being is the conceptualization of a part of God within oneself and its amalgamation into the universe.

In his Caucasian Short Stories, written in Germany, the liminal phase becomes a certain connecting corridor between the human passion and the sacred. The dichotomous attitude to reality, the search for the reason of being causes the emergence of the desire of separation and transition with a character. Gr. Robakidze conceives of liminal being as the unification of the separated reason of the “lost” (forgotten) god first in an individual’s and later in a community’s cognition.