NATELA KHINCHIGASHVILI - Tbilisi State University

proper husband to his daughter, for three months Arkazar allows the princess
asking where her father keeps the wine, and for three months the wine is being
kept in the vessels till it fails. In the legend there also act three main characters:
Arkazari, the princess and the crowd. Three oppositions are emphasized: beautiful
body – capricious soul (princess), ugly body - beautiful soul (Arkazar),
simple form – perfect work (the best wine kept in stone vessels). The narrative
of the story is organized around three motifs or plot cores: the noblest person of
the kingdom is also the ugliest one; the princess is looking for spiritually perfect
husband; the wine is being drunk from the most beautiful vessels, but is kept in
the ugliest ones. All these triads are subordinated for the problematic triad or fro
three postulates: 1) “a noble soul is specially kept by nature in an ugly body for
it not to become arrogant and not to wander bad way“; 2) “outward shapes are
deceptive“; 3) only spiritually rich person perceives the real truth (Zalatorius,
2003: 226).
According to Tamošaitis, two types of characters are seen in the creation of
Krėvė: an individualistic hero and pantheist sage (Tamošaitis 1998: 256). The
hero of “Prajekabuda“, in which Krėvė creatively used the story of life of Buddha,
who lived in the 6 th a. BC, as if fuses these typical features of the characters.
The work is based not only on the philosophy of Buddhism, but also the
emotional attitude of romanticism as well as human conception of the writer
himself, therefore one can look for more varied interpretations of the legend.
Teaching of Buddha for Krėvė was just an impulse to raise the universal questions
of the being of the person and to create specific style of orient.
The main hero of the legend, Atipranaprijas, decides finding out the most
important secrets of being: “I want to know why people and everything else,
what is in the world, are born, are able, suffer, struggle and finally die... Die and
vanish in the infinite of nothing... I want to understand why in human’s heart
there lives the truth which is not doomed to settle in his works... I want to understand
why the pain is felt by the one who does harm and the one who suffers
the harm...“ (Krėvė 1982: 386). Vainly the god of nothing, Mritrija, tries to
tempt turning Atipranaprijas out of the way of his hunts – he stays solid and sure
that life is eternal, that only its shapes change, that a Human is an integral part of the
Universe and at the same time it is a separate world“ (Česnulevičiūtė 1982: 6).
Meanwhile another character of “Pratjekabuda“ – maharaja Savalkija tries to
give a sense to himself in the material area. Being blinded by the honour and the
desire for power, for being in the focus of attention, he looks for his place on the
earth enslaving other nations, building rich temples and thinking that he is immortal,
powerful and overwhelming. Suddenly, the foundations of his immutable
life are shattered by the news that in the world there are many more powerful
than him, many more rich cities and temples than he has built. Suddenly,
he remembers the words of the whilom killed Usinara that the knowledge of a
person constantly enlarges. Savalkija loses his rest, he tries to think about the
road of passed life, he refuses the wealth, power and aiming at the rest of soul,
he goes to the waste to redeem his guilt.
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