Erlom Akhvlediani’s Vano and Niko illustrates the human condition through the prism of masculine companionship. Akhvlediani’s minimalist prose pieces are Kafkaesque parables presenting individual experience as a quest for the other.
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Like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet or Beckett’s Mercier and Camier, Erlom Akhvlediani’s Vano and Niko illustrates the human condition through the prism of masculine companionship. Akhvlediani’s minimalist prose pieces are Kafkaesque parables presenting individual experience as a quest for the other. Peter Handke, who met Akhvlediani in 1975, described these works as “exhilarating and at the same time paradoxical,” and saw them as illustrating a redemptive “third way”: that of waylessness. Written in the 1950s, Akhvlediani’s book enjoys cult status throughout present-day Georgia, and is sometimes included in the philosophy curriculum of national universities.