Kharazishvili, Sergo. Sketches (Narkvevebi). First edition. Tbilisi, 1955. In Georgian.

ხარაზიშვილი, სერგო. ნარკვევები / რედაქტორი თ. სულიაშვილი ; მხატვარი ო. ვარვარიძე. გამოცემა პირველი.
თბილისი : სახელგამი, 1955. 176 გვერდი ; 18 სმ.
მაგარი ყდა. ტირაჟი 3 000 ც.
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Kharazishvili, Sergo. Sketches / editor T. Suliashvili ; cover and design by O. Varvaridze. First edition.
Tbilisi : Sakhelgami (State Publishing House of the Georgian SSR), 1955. 176 pp. ; 18 cm.
Hardcover. Print run of 3,000 copies.
Binding good: corners worn with small losses to the covering material; spine ends rubbed. Text block good: brown staining to endpapers and scattered foxing spots to a few leaves; sewing firm, text complete.

A first edition collection of twelve reportage sketches by the Georgian journalist Sergo Kharazishvili, issued in a small print run of 3,000 copies by Sakhelgami, the state publishing house of the Georgian SSR, and printed at the Komunisti polygraphic combine in Tbilisi. The volume belongs to the ocherki tradition, the documentary sketch genre that occupied a central place in Soviet literary production and served as the principal vehicle through which the industrial transformation of the national republics was narrated to a domestic readership. Kharazishvili's subjects map the major construction projects of postwar Soviet Georgia with unusual directness: the metallurgical works at Rustavi, the flagship steel city built from nothing in the Kvemo Kartli steppe during and after the war; the Khrami hydroelectric station in the mountains of the south; and the Lajanuri hydroelectric station in Racha-Lechkhumi, to whose builders two linked sketches are devoted. Other pieces treat fishermen, a combine operator, a dispatcher's control room, and the testing of a file-cutting machine, the characteristic small-scale production reportage of the period. Two sketches stand apart and give the volume its wider interest: one recording twenty months spent in China at the height of Sino-Soviet technical cooperation, the other set on the banks of the Kodori in Abkhazia. Published in 1955, in the first years after Stalin's death and shortly before the Twentieth Party Congress, the book documents the industrial self-image of the Georgian republic at a specific and short-lived moment.