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(Links to previous Chapters are available here: Volume I, Volume II, and Chapter 21, 22)
July 5, 2011.
The great twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht had a play titled “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” [Here and thereafter “Caucasian” refers exclusively to the inhabitants of the Caucasus mountains. The Russian language does not utilize the word “Caucasian” as a generic term for white people – translator’s note]. It depicts an ancient Chinese legend in a contemporary style. The essence of the legend is that there is a child. There is a woman who has become his mother, who raises him and loves him terribly – Grusha Vachnadze, if my memory serves me correctly (everything takes place in some Georgian village). And there is a princess, who once abandoned this child, and now wants to take possession of the child and screams that she is his true mother.
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