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Vladimir Shatakishvili. Confession of a Toastmaster
Biography of Vladimir Shatakishvili. To the Book «Confession of a Toastmaster»
Six Trips to Munich
Seeing-off in Tel Aviv
Letter from Boston
Interview with Valery Semikhatov
The Cheerful Family. The last interview with Bichiko Davlianidze
If you have a good time, then does it like the Russians. Interview with Vladimir Shalaev
Our friend – Roman Abramovich
Отрывок из книги
Vladimir Shatakishvili
Open-minded and hospitable Shatakishvili had many friends, each with his/her own fate and peculiarity. Some are now in Moscow, others are in Georgia, Ukraine, and other countries. Friendship can be broken by the distance and the fate, but friendship, sealed in the memory of the heart and in the books, is immortal. It is impossible to list all the heroes of the books of the author. Some of them are being discussed even today. Hardly anyone knows that the current Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich began his career from the bottom – in Kislovodsk, in the city where Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent his childhood. Sergey Mikhalkov, Genrikh Borovik studied in school No. 1 of Pyatigorsk – the favourite city of Yan Frenkel, Arkady and Georgy Vajner, Viktor Manuilov, Stanislav Govorukhin, Boris Rozenfeld, Vladimir Shalaev, Albert Fardzinov. And Irakly Andronnikov, Anatoliy Aleksin, Mikhail Tanich, Lion Izmailov, Andrei Dementiev, Shamil Tarpischev… were the guests of Shatakishvili, and he wrote kindly and interesting about of them.
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Vladimir Shatakishvili began to write books when his beloved wife got seriously ill. He had to do something just to stay in this world. The longing and the bitterness overshadowed the whole world when the blue eyes of Lyudmila closed forever, but the fourteen-year-old son Sandro (Alex), with a desperate hope, was looking at Vladimir with the same blue eyes… He had to live! So, he wrote dozens of notebooks with confessions of the «resurrected» toastmaster, whose good friends never ceased to invite him to feasts, where he said lovely words wishing them eternal health, love, happiness, and wealth… Having found out about his diaries, the son persuaded his father to publish these stories, and soon his books came out: «The Casket of Colourful Contemporaries» (2004); «Ball Wanted» (2005); «The Most Russian Person» (2007); «Companion at the Feast» (2012); «How Good we Badly Lived» (2014).
In the book «CONFESSION OF A TOASTMASTER» includes selected texts of these books in the genre of travelogue, where the author describes not only trips with his friends, but looks at the national colouring through the prism of his perception of the universe, so the works of Vladimir Shatakishvili have a lot of Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Jewish, Kabardian, Ossetian, Dagestani. And this brings the reader back to the Soviet period, when people did not ask each other about nationality. Between the lines one can see the social observation of the author, and one wonders how the author, as the son of the prominent lawyer, enjoying wealth and freedom, has not lost decency he and love for people! Is he the Epicurean who has not drowned the nobility of his soul in the sea of brands?
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