Dumbadze, Nodar. Me, Grandma, Iliko and Ilarion; I See the Sun (Me, bebia, iliko da ilarioni; Me vkhedav mzes). 1966. In Georgian.

დუმბაძე, ნოდარ (1928-1984). მე, ბებია, ილიკო და ილარიონი ; მე ვხედავ მზეს.
თბილისი : გამომცემლობა „საბჭოთა საქართველო", 1966. 335 გვერდი : ილ. ; 22 სმ.
მაგარი ყდა. ტირაჟი 30 000 ც.
***
Dumbadze, Nodar (1928-1984). Me, Grandma, Iliko and Ilarion; I See the Sun.
Tbilisi : Sabchota Sakartvelo (Soviet Georgia) Publishing House, 1966. 335 pp. : illustrated ; 22 cm.
Hardcover. Print run of 30,000 copies.
Binding good: cloth with general light wear. Text block good: leaves evenly age-yellowed; text complete throughout.

Nodar Dumbadze (1928-1984) is the most universally beloved Georgian prose writer of the twentieth century, and his two novellas collected in this volume - Me, Grandma, Iliko and Ilarion (1960) and I See the Sun (1962) - are the foundational works on which his international reputation rests. The first novella, Dumbadze's debut, is a warmly comic and at times melancholic account of the wartime childhood of an orphaned Georgian boy, Zuriko, raised by his grandmother Olgha and her two idiosyncratic neighbors Iliko and Ilarion in rural western Georgia. The book draws on strong autobiographical elements from Dumbadze's own wartime childhood in Adjaria, and its blend of folk humor, pathos, and lyric simplicity proved immediately and durably appealing to readers across the Soviet Union and internationally. The novella was adapted into a celebrated 1962 film directed by Tengiz Abuladze. The second novella, I See the Sun, treats the wartime period from a more direct angle, with the Adjarian landscape and the shadow of the war over village life as its central concern. Both novellas were awarded the Shota Rustaveli State Prize in 1975, and Dumbadze subsequently received the Lenin Prize in 1980 - the highest Soviet literary honor - for his collected body of work.