The Dichotomy of Good and Evil and the 1930s Repressions in Zaira Arsenishvili’s Pebbles

Abstract

The Communist Party began to purposefully transform the public into the Soviet people by way of applying various means, repressions being the most severe among them. The bloody terror of the 1930s both physically destroyed and inflicted a major psychological shock to intellectuals and their close ones. So called ‘people’s enemies,’ ‘wreckers’ became victims of the repressions, and, owing to the instinct of survival, their family members had to conform with the Soviet system. In her book of stories Pebbles, from the tragic standpoint of an eyewitness, Zaira Arsenishvili tells about people’s desperate being within the dichotomy of the good and evil in the most troubled times, about timeservers and noble ones,, about so called Stockholm syndrome due to which the majority of people lost the capability to perceive reality and, in their imaginations, the definitions of the good and evil exchanged their places.