In the significant literature on socialist realism, the question of national form remains rather neglected.Footnote 1 However, the interrelation between national form and socialist content is important both for clarifying the formative role of national literatures within the multilingual Soviet literature and for the evolution of the national literatures themselves.
The problem of the proper relation between socialist content and national form in the diverse literatures of the Soviet Union with very different traditions of literacy, development, and circulation—from young literatures to traditional ones, and from the literatures with a global audience to small, minor, or even ultra-minor literatures reaching only small local communities—remained unresolved. The problem of the relation between national form and socialist content looked different from the center, the semiperipheries, and the peripheries. As it came from the center, the method of socialist realism outlined by Maksim Gor΄kii and Andrei Zhdanov was equally obligatory for everyone. In line with their reports, the party leadership determined the content and the form had to be learned from the classics (“Pushkins”), which only Russian literature possessed.Footnote 2 Despite the postulated and constantly emphasized equality, Soviet literature followed the same asymmetry between the center and the periphery that the USSR did.Footnote 3
Since Soviet scholarship did not theorize any distinction between literary centers and peripheries, we can refer to models that preceded the Soviet project or models found in the theories of world literature.Footnote 4 The search for national specificity and even national form was not unique to the Soviet literary project. The questions of what embodies national specificity, form, color, content, and language, and especially how cultures not regarded as central and therefore universal could contribute to European or world culture were the subjects of political and artistic debates around 1900 in the Russian empire.Footnote 5
The American literary scholar Harsha Ram has convincingly applied Lev Trotskii's model of unequal and combined development to Georgian national modernism as exemplified by the group “Blue Horns.”Footnote 6 In a triangular structure that Ram compares to Latin American modernismo, the Blue Horns adopted forms from, inter alia, Russian symbolism, changed their content, and played them out against Russia's political and cultural hegemony by orienting themselves to a rival cosmopolitan center (Europe). Even if modernism in Georgia is not reducible to national modernism, as it included the international and multilingual avant-garde of Tbilisi and Soviet-friendly Georgian Futurism/Dadaism, this “triangulated sense of cultural geography, involving Russia, Europe and Georgia was to define local debates until Soviet annexation severed Georgia's ties to the West.”Footnote 7
After the Sovietization of Georgia, Europe broke away as the competing (cultural) center. Thus, the relationship between the center and the periphery changed. To describe this changed situation, I will utilize the model of the American literary critic Franco Moretti. Although Moretti has addressed the question of the center's relationship to the semiperiphery and periphery in several books and essays, and has relativized and differentiated his original views, for heuristic reasons my reference is the model from the article “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur.”Footnote 8 Since my examples will be novels, I will take Moretti's plot/style model of the novel as a point of departure to reflect on the relationships of national form and socialist content.
As Moretti claims, starting from the eighteenth century, “Specific details obviously differ from case to case, but the formal logic remains the same. These novels are all ‘amalgamations of different traditions’ and all of the same kind: they combine a plot from the core, and a style from the periphery.”Footnote 9 According to Moretti, such a division became possible because the novel is a composite form, consisting of “plot,” or “the internal concatenation of events,” and “style” (linguistic design). The plot remained stable and unchanged in literary systems regardless of the context, while the style was “nothing but language and accordingly varied.”Footnote 10 In what follows, I will use instead a more complex idea of the relationship between plot and style based on Viktor Shklovskii and Iuri Lotman.Footnote 11
Moretti's proposed model of the literary relationship between the center and the periphery can be applied to multinational Soviet literature, but with the caveat that the view of this literature was only from the center: content was set by the party leadership, and internal form (for example, the plot structure) was developed in central literatures, while national literatures could work on external form (including the actual plot and stylistic design).Footnote 12
Among the Soviet literatures, Georgian literature had a specificity due to its long and continuous literary tradition, into which socialist realism had to inscribe itself. Georgian Soviet literature possessed the poetry and prose of the kolkhoz and industrialization. It created its own Leniniana and Staliniana and World War II literature, which differed from Russian-language analogs in language and local color, but did not introduce anything qualitatively new into Soviet literature.Footnote 13 The national form of socialist content in Georgian literature was a phenomenon of style more in the broad understanding of Shklovskii, which includes plot, than in the narrower, linguistic understanding of Moretti.
This Georgian national form of socialist realism emerged in the form of a narrative that amalgamated myth and history and then migrated into a genre that, by analogy with the Great American Novel, can be called the Great Georgian Novel: a narrative about Georgia's fate in the form of an epic novel. I will call it epic not only because of its large form that claimed seniority in the genre hierarchy, but also because of its stylistic register established in the 1930s, which was elevated in comparison with the style of critical realism.
The Great Georgian Novel was not a purely literary phenomenon; it was an instrument for building and (re)defining the nation. It not only discussed the nation's present and future, but also reshaped its past in light of future and present. I believe that the key difference of Georgian national form from the master plot of socialist realism is the centrality of the past instead of the present or the future.Footnote 14 In the version that took shape under Stalin, the Great Georgian Novel was an appropriation of nationalism (a literary correlate of Georgia's Sovietization). The novels of the late Georgian Thaw were an attempt, through the (re)appropriation of the genre, to de-Stalinize the Georgian historical narrative.
In this article, I will discuss the emergence of the Georgian national form out of the polemics of socialist realism with Georgian modernism,Footnote 15 which it tried to challenge and rewrite, and from which it “expropriated” the genre of the Great Georgian Novel, as well as its evolution in the novels of the 1970s, which tried to challenge and rewrite the Stalinist historical and mythological narrative that had already taken shape in the Great Georgian Novel. The last two parts of my article are devoted to an analysis of two 1970s novels. I will focus in more detail on them since it is precisely the criticism of socialist realism in the late Georgian Thaw novels that draws lines of inheritance and differentiation and reveals content-related and formal features.
As I will demonstrate, the modernist novel and the socialist realist novel in Georgia had a common, mythical understanding of history. Accordingly, socialist realism did not need to create a new form but merely to modify the existing one. The generation of the Georgian seventies, on the contrary, had to look for new forms of literary de-Stalinization, since a straightforward replacement of the Stalinist narrative with a conventionally national one within the established form only conserved literary Stalinism.
The Past as a National Form
At the First Congress of Soviet Writers, the report of the head of the Georgian delegation, Malak‘ia Torošeliże, was strikingly different from both Gor΄kii's report and the reports of his colleagues regarding national literatures. Torošeliże put forward several theses that were controversial in the context of the congress and, in some respects, ahead of the latter interpretation of Soviet history and its place in world history. Torošeliże declared that the key to understanding modern Georgian literature was not the revolutionary transformations and Sovietization of Georgia but the history of Georgian literature.Footnote 16 While other speakers emphasized the difference between Soviet and pre-Soviet literature, Torošeliże emphasized “continuous literary tradition.”Footnote 17 Without openly contradicting Gor΄kii, he characterized Georgian literature not as a small one, of a “provincial, narrowly local scale,” but rather as one of the “big literatures.” The status of Georgian literature as “big” was guaranteed by the medieval poet Šot‘a Rust‘aveli and his poem “The Knight in the Panther's Skin,” which Torošeliże counted among “the greatest monuments of world literature.” Thus, Georgia had its own world-class classic writer.Footnote 18 According to Torošeliże, national form was possible, and should be sought not in contemporary authors, and not (only) in Russian or foreign classics, but in the history of national literatures.
Torošeliże's report was not based on his own ideas.Footnote 19 Beso Žgenti, a literary critic and in 1934 secretary of the Georgian Writers’ Union, who took a direct part in the preparations for the congress, recorded in his memoirs that Stalin commissioned the report, and a whole group of philologists, critics, and writers had worked on it.Footnote 20 Stalin's personal intervention (and co-authorship), brought to the attention of the congress organizers, turned Torošeliże's report into the third keynote, devoted specifically to questions of national form, along with the speeches of Zhdanov and Gor΄kii.Footnote 21
According to Žgenti's recollections, Torošeliże's initial report spoke about “the enslaved peoples of the Russian empire,” liberated by the revolution and given “an opportunity for cultural creativity,” and about the Georgian people “for 15 years” creating “under the conditions of a socialist system, their own national literature.”Footnote 22 Stalin, who had summoned Torošeliże a month before the congress, instructed Georgian writers to showcase the cultural achievements of the past.Footnote 23 The national form of Georgian socialist realism was declared to be the past, through which, paradoxically, the path to the future lay.
Stalin personally outlined the interpretative narrative of the history of Georgian literature. Hayden White, a pioneer of the narratological reading of historical texts, distinguished between a strictly historical explanation and a general, metahistorical interpretation of the historical process (found, for example, in Marx or Hegel). White believed that every story contains a metahistorical interpretation.Footnote 24 He argued that “interpretation in history” consisted of “the provisions of the plot structure for a sequence of events so that their nature as a comprehensible process is revealed by their figuration as a story of a particular kind,” meaning by this a genre register, for example, tragedy, comedy, novel, epic, satire, and so forth.Footnote 25 According to White, “in historical narrative, story is to plot as the exposition of ‘what happened’ in the past is to the synoptic characterization of what the whole sequence of events contained in the narrative might ‘mean’ or ‘signify.’”Footnote 26 “Pre-generic plot structure” precedes and structures the material of historical research. Unlike White, in the context of socialist realism, I will call a historical narrative not a genre modality and the accompanying stylistic register, which sets a certain interpretation of history, but a certain arrangement of cardinal events and their assessment from the point of view of historical progress, conditioned by the knowledge of the end of history.
Stalin's narrative interpretation of Georgian literary history rejected the historical assessments of the Georgian left, the Mensheviks, national deviators, and RAPP members. It returned to the conventional, national version of the history of Georgian literature, considered bourgeois-nationalist after the Sovietization of Georgia.Footnote 27 It was evidence of a change in milestones: the past itself was rehabilitated, but on the condition that the historical narrative was determined specifically by the party leadership.
However, what looked like rehabilitation was, in fact, the appropriation of the entire Georgian literary tradition and its history into the canon of Soviet literature and Soviet history. The understanding of history also changed: the historical narrative was understood as a single whole of the past, present, and future. If before the “victory of socialism in a single country” the end of history was accentuated, then since the 1930s the past and, in particular, the origins (the beginning of history in general and beginnings of particular histories, a trend that fully developed after the end of World War II) became increasingly important. Paradoxically, the future was the most known part of history as a whole.Footnote 28 The past understood in the light of the not-yet-come but certain future became the same legitimate object of depiction as the present. However, the past (like the present) received the status of reality from the not-yet-future. In the Georgian case, it became the major topic of Georgian Soviet literature.
The Great Georgian Novel: Between Modernism and Socialist Realism
In the Georgian case, socialist content was associated with a new historical narrative that needed a national literary form. If the Soviet party leadership assumed the complete superiority of content over form (in the extreme case, as in the myth of the beginning and end of history, the form was thought to be completely transparent), the very historicity of the national form implied that it held elements uncontrolled by the socialist content. The turn to history and myth in the Georgian version of socialist realism was associated not with the desire to create a new history (the admittedly erroneous path taken by RAPP), but a change in the meaning of the existing one. Socialism, as Stalin believed, was made “native” through its growth into the local cultural tradition, and the socialist content completely changed the meaning of the bourgeois form that had existed before.
The appeal to history and myth became the central theme of Georgia after the Bolshevik occupation and Sovietization of Georgia, especially after the defeat of the 1924 conspiracy and uprising against the Bolsheviks and the subsequent terror. Questions about the reason for the defeat of Georgia and the trauma of the loss of barely acquired national independence were posed in Georgian fiction and journalism throughout the 1920s. To answer these questions, Georgian writers began to turn to the historical past and myth. The discussion that followed Mixeil Javaxišvili's novel Jaqo's Disposessed, and Nikolo Micišvili's essay Thoughts about Georgia tended to challenge their radical skepticism and counter them with an optimistic vision of Georgia's past and present.Footnote 29
Myth appears in Georgian literature at the end of the nineteenth century with Važa-Pšavela (1861–1915), who made the inhabitants of the eastern Caucasus the heroes of his poems. They lived, however, not in the mythical but rather in the historical past. This outside-of-time world was self-contained and did not come into contact with the world of modernity, although the revival of myth in Važa-Pšavela was itself a sign of emerging modernity. Javaxišvili was the first to turn to this world for help. In his novel White Collar (1926), a weak-willed intellectual, the geologist Elizbar, accidentally ends up in a Xevsur village, where he gradually begins to live the life of Važa-Pšavela's heroes. Elizbar does not remain in the mountains, however, and after being “cured” of his decadent intellectualism, reconciles enlightenment with chivalry and returns to the city again.
Soviet literature tried to reverse the meaning of this myth. Authors like Zinaida Rikhter or Sergei Tret΄iakov described the Georgian Caucasus as the last refuge of the archaic, which had to be included in the Soviet modernization project.Footnote 30
Although Georgian prose that tried to become Soviet repeated this narrative at a superficial level, the assessment of the victory of the new over the old in the novel by Konstantine Gamsaxurdia, The Abduction of the Moon (1933/1934), or the play by Šalva Dadiani, Tetnuldi (1931), was far from unambiguous. Even if it was not mourned directly, the leaving of the old was presented not in a triumphant register but rather a lamenting one.Footnote 31
Grigol Robak‘iże, the leading intellectual of Georgia in the 1920s, in articles and novels tried to counterbalance Javxshišvili's and Micišvili's skeptical assessment of the Georgian past with a messianic vision of Georgian history and myth-making.Footnote 32 Robak‘iże (influenced by the Russian symbolist novel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oswald Spengler) at different times turned to the Važa-Pšavela myth (Lamara, 1928), the myth of the Argonauts (Megi: A Georgian Girl, 1932), the myth of the holy Grail (Guardians of the Grail, 1937), and he created the myth of Kardu, a national myth based on the collection of medieval historical texts “The Life of Kartli.”Footnote 33 In his myth-making and search for a fundamental principle, Robak‘iże mixed myth and history, mythologizing the latter and giving it an eternal, timeless meaning.Footnote 34 In the novel Guardians of the Grail, written in Germany in German, poets and artists are the guardians (their prototypes are members of Blue Horns), their antagonists are the Soviet Cheka, and the Grail itself is a symbol of the “national spirit” that the Cheka cannot break despite the death of the protagonist Levan Orbeli. Unlike Javaxišvili, for whom the appeal to myth serves as a bridge to modernity, Robak‘iże's myth becomes self-sufficient; his appeal to the mythical (and not historical) past replaces the present and the future, and, like a century earlier, political romanticism comes to replace political realism, transferring the attempt to solve political problems into the closed sphere of the aesthetic.Footnote 35 Robak‘iże himself defined his work as “mythical realism,” implying a higher mythical reality, one more real than everyday life.Footnote 36 In this sense, the mythical realism of Robak΄iże and socialist realism had a common denominator. If in mythical realism the timeless myth (the time of the national spirit) acted as a more real reality, then in socialist realism the role of the highest reality was played by the “faraway of socialism” (Boris Pasternak), the end of history. Both types of realism took away the status of reality and replaced the temporal with the supposedly timeless, the eternal. If the past, although receding, turned out to be more “familiar” than the new, the party task in literature, especially after the writers’ congress, was to transform the new into the familiar, to grow it into local conditions.Footnote 37
The socialist content did not create a new Soviet form but reformatted the existing one, which was affectively charged with national feeling. This form in the 1930s turned out to be the Great Georgian Novel, with its amalgam of history and myth.
The Historical Narrative of Georgian Socialist Realism
There were no large-scale industrial projects in agrarian Georgia comparable to the White Sea Canal or Dneproges (Dnieper Hydroelectric Station). The largest project of all-Union significance in the 1930s was the draining of the Colchis lowland swamps and its transformation into tea and citrus plantations that were supposed to supply the entire USSR.
The literary treatment of Colchis began in the late 1920s. Tic΄ian Tabiże, a leading Blue Horns poet, who was executed in 1937, wrote two poems about Colchis, “Rioni-Port” (1928) and “New Colchis” (1931). In 1934, Konstantin Paustovskii's book Colchis was published.Footnote 38 The Colchis narrative received its final, canonical form in 1937, however, in the collection The New Colchis. The editors of the collection were Kandid Č‘arkviani, at that time the Chair of the Georgian Writers’ Union, who replaced the executed Torošeliże and a year later Beria as the leader of Georgia's Communist Party and hence de facto head of the Soviet republic, and Simon Č‘ik‘ovani, a former futurist/dadaist and secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union of Georgia. It includes poems by thirty leading Georgian poets.
A feature of the collection was not only a clear distinction between content (preface) and form (poetry) but the construction of a metaplot common to all the poems in the collection, by that time unique of its kind for Soviet literature; this emphasized the peculiarity of the Georgian national form of socialist realism. There were three time periods in the plot: the future of socialism, the pre-revolutionary past, and antiquity. Moreover, as in Torošeliże's earlier report to the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, the future turned out to be directly linked to antiquity and was not a refutation of it, but a continuation.
The fabulous future of socialism continued the traditions of the ancient “gold-bearing” Colchis. This “renaissance” not only stylized the leaders of the party and Soviet workers (who, at least in the official ideology, were the creators of a new life) into continuators of antiquity, but also emphasized a new philosophy of history in which the USSR was seen as the crown of historical development. With the victory of the doctrine of building socialism in one country, territorialized socialism needed history. Georgia (and Armenia) could provide the USSR with a place in ancient history. The foreword of the publication turned the ancient Colchians into predecessors of the Soviet workers, who, in a hostile (capitalist) environment, defended their freedom and built a new Colchis.
The next period of time, that of decline, was not clearly defined, but was associated with (Georgian) feudalism and (Russian) tsarism. The foreword's authors discern a reason for the decline in the endless wars with newcomers from the west and east. The decline of Colchis and its transformation into a “kingdom of mosquitoes and frogs” created a contrasting backdrop for its Soviet restoration. If the inhabitants of Colchis, tormented by poverty and disease, were barely capable of survival, then “our heroic people, liberated by the great party of Lenin and Stalin, fought for the revival of Colchis.”Footnote 39
Unlike the rehabilitation of the historical narrative at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, The New Colchis created another important precedent: it literally blurred the line between history and myth. Not only the legend of the Argonauts but also archaeological excavations in the Colchis lowlands testified to the “heroic past of our people.”Footnote 40 The reference to the myth transformed the plot of the restoration of Colchis laid out in the preface into a historical and mythological one. The central event of the mythological plot was the demiurgic act of conquering land from the sea and turning it into a paradise.Footnote 41
The preface to The New Colchis specified not only the content but also the internal form: the transformation of the semi-mythical, semi-historical “gold-bearing” Colchis after a long decline into a new Soviet paradise by the demiurgical will and effort of the leaders of the party and the heroic Soviet people led by them. The authors of the collection remained within the framework of this metaplot and worked on the external form (poetic meter, figures of speech, and the like).
The national form was divided between external (linguistic) and internal (plot structure) form. The content common to all the literature of Soviet industrialization was emploted differently in Georgia. The internal form (plot structure: greatness—decline—new greatness) becomes possible because Colchis is associated with Greek mythology, which, in turn, throws light on history: archaeology, according to Heinrich Schliemann's tradition, follows mythology.Footnote 42
The internal form, which mediated between the socialist content and the external (linguistic) form, had in turn an effect on the (general Soviet) content. The blurring of boundaries between history and myth had direct consequences for the subsequent view of the party leadership on the representation of the past in historical and literary texts.
The closer the story approached its beginning and end, the more blurred the boundaries between myth, history, and literature, between factual and fictional narration became. The “extreme” mythical “reality” of the beginning and end of history made it possible to construct the event chain of the plot in its pure form without regard to actual limitations, to evaluate individual events in one way or another, and to give the whole story a certain meaning.Footnote 43 In the “mythical” time of the beginning and end of history, the “socialist” content of history fully determined the form of the narrative without resistance from the aspect of the form.Footnote 44 The mythical narrative about the beginning and the end of history became a “degree zero” model for the narrative of socialist realism, regardless of which segment of history (distant or recent past) was being processed. At the same time, actual reality had to be brought in line with the “historical” narrative, even if the “physical reality,” for example in the cinema, directly contradicted it.Footnote 45 Moving away from the beginning and the end, the form acquired more concrete outlines and resisted the content, although in any case, it had to remain dependent on the content.
The Historical Myth of Konstantine Gamsaxurdia
The author who first tried, improved, and approved the amalgam method of myth and history in the prose of Georgian socialist realism was Konstantine Gamsaxurdia (1893–1975). An anti-Soviet public figure and expressionist in the 1920s, the German-educated Gamsaxurdia gradually became the main nomenclature prose writer of Georgia. Of all the Soviet Georgian prose writers, it was Gamsaxurdia who remained in the literary canon of post-Stalinist and post-Soviet Georgia. The popular appeal is due to his historical novels, which replaced episodes of Georgian history with an overall mythologization of history.
Gamsaxurdia first applied the technique of blurring the boundaries of history and fiction and giving it a pseudo-real status in the novel The Leader (1938–39), then improving it in the historical novels that brought him all-Union fame, The Right Hand of the Great Master (1939) and David the Builder (1942–62). In 1939, the first and only part of the announced trilogy about Stalin's childhood, adolescence, and youth came out. The novel's text is literally stuffed with gospel, mythological, and historical allusions: it begins with the shepherds’ adoration of the infant Joseph. Since childhood, the character Soso Juġašvili is a prodigy and fighter for justice, associated not only with the mythical Amirani/Prometheus, but also, through his (historically unreliable) teacher Mikhail K‘ilipt‘ari, with the whole history of Georgia.Footnote 46 If The New Colchis collection endowed myth with a pseudo-historical status, then Gamsaxurdia's innovation was the technique of turning history into a myth: the starting point for Gamsaxurdia was the minimal factual material around which he built an epic, making liberal use of small reliable ethnographic details, a technique that Roland Barthes called effet de réel.
The experiment with the novel about Stalin was unsuccessful, and Gamsaxurdia was advised to stop working on the trilogy. Gamsaxurdia turned instead to the medieval history of Georgia, but his creative method had not changed. Gamsaxurdia's David the Builder combined trends from The Leader and The Right Hand of the Great Master. In the latter, Gamsaxurdia had tried out the stylistic correlate of transforming history into myth: a language stylized after medieval Georgian chronicles with an abundance of archaic vocabulary that gave the completely fictional action an aura of historical authenticity. Gamsaxurdia used the same language in David the Builder. The language was so loaded with archaisms that the novel had to be supplied with a dictionary of several hundred words. The peculiarity of Gamsaxurdia's style lay not only in the archaic vocabulary, but also in a syntax stylized after the high style of the chronicles, with the active use of postposition (with the adjective following the noun).Footnote 47
Unlike The Right Hand of the Great Master, there was no plot conflict in The Leader and David the Builder. If in The Right Hand of the Great Master the romanticized conflict between the artist (Konstantine Arsakiże) and authority (King Giorgi I), is the plot engine of the novel, then in David the Builder, which is not entirely devoid of a romantic twist, conflict does not play a plot-forming role. The figures of Stalin in The Leader and David in David the Builder do not change in time. Both are burdened with knowledge and wisdom from childhood and act as personifications of state power rather than its agents. The Leader and David the Builder are devoid of any conflict between consciousness and spontaneity, which Katerina Clark considered the central conflict of the socialist realist novel. Rather, Gamsaxurdia's novels follow a historical necessity personified in the figures of Stalin and King David.Footnote 48
The Leader and David the Builder are parallel novels. Gamsaxurdia connects both historical figures in the metaplot of the history of Georgia: Stalin is David the Builder today. Stalin is the hero who resurrects the medieval grandeur of Georgia, the foundation of which was laid by David the Builder, and which neither feudalism nor bourgeois nationalism could resurrect.Footnote 49
Gamsaxurdia's historical novels marked the final transition from modernism to socialist realism, which in the Georgian case meant a pivot from the present to the past. The idealized past of Georgia in its mythologized version was closed, blocking the way to the present and the future. Georgia was confined in the past; the present and the future were no longer Georgian, strictly speaking, but all-Soviet, and Stalin acted as their figuration.
The historical novel has become one of the most popular and widely read genres. Almost every period of Georgian history became a topic for a historical novel. Still, I will single out only two of them: the tetralogy The Sorrow of the Heroes (1958–62) by Levan Got‘ua and the tetralogy Sabers without Scabbards (1976–81) by Levan Sanikiże. The latter took Gamsaxurdia's trend to extremes: lacking Gamsaxurdia's literary mastery, Sanikiże not only retold the chronicles by giving them a literary form but also replaced history with a mythical story that became the blueprint of Georgian jingoistic nationalism.
After Socialist Realism: A New Narrative in an Old Form
Following the English literary critic Donald Rayfield, I believe that the thaw in Georgia came much later than in Russia, in the early 1970s.Footnote 50 There were several reasons: on the one hand, the leadership of the Georgian literary periodicals was conservative;Footnote 51 on the other, Khrushchev's de-Stalinization was perceived ambiguously in Georgia, not as liberalization but rather as an anti-Georgian turn in Soviet policy.Footnote 52 The revision of Stalinist socialist realism began in 1957 with the magazine C‘iskari, which became a stronghold of the Georgian sixties’ generation. In short prose, a clear deviation from Stalinist social realism was outlined among the forerunners of the Georgian sixties, Guram Rč΄eulišvili (1934–1960), as well as among the older generation, for example, Giorgi Šatberašvili's Dead Man's Sun (1960), and Giorgi Leoniże in the Wish Tree cycle (1962).
The late Georgian thaw in the 1970s began with attempts at literary de-Stalinization. However, this effort only partially succeeded. The heyday of the Georgian novel came in the 1970s, although key figures in that heyday had made their debut in the 1960s in poetry or short prose. While Ot΄ar Čilaże (1933–2009) (A Man Was Going Down the Road [1973], And Everyone Who Meets Me [1976], Iron Theater [1981], March Rooster [1987], Avelum [1995], Basket [2003]), Čabua Amirejibi (1921–2013) (Data Tutashkhia [1972–75]), Guram Doč΄anašvili (1939–2021) (The First Vestment [1975]), and Ot‘ar Č‘xeiże (1920–2007) (Haze Heat [1974]) all turned in their novels to history, mythology, and legend, continuing the tradition of the Great Georgian Novel, Nodar Dumbaże (1928–1984) and Guram Panjikiże (1933–1997) turned to the present.Footnote 53 The appeal to myth and history attempted to reevaluate Georgia's historical past after Stalin's death. This reevaluation took place in the same form, amalgamating myth and history that Georgian socialist realism had used. In his debut novel A Man Was Going Down the Road, Ot‘ar Čilaże turned to the myth of the Argonauts. Perhaps the mythological theme was the reason for the compartmentalization of Čilaże (and the entire pleiad of the Georgian sixties/seventies) into “magical realism.”Footnote 54 Despite a certain “elective affinity” between Georgian and Spanish-speaking authors from Colombia, Peru, or Cuba,Footnote 55 the reason for this affinity should be sought in similar objectives and in the forms in which these objectives were addressed: both of them tried to comprehend their historical past, the reasons for their defeats and non-freedom, and both used the forms developed by literary modernism.Footnote 56 In this context, the novels of Čilaże, Doč‘anašvili, or Amirejibi could be read as an attempt to de-Stalinize historical consciousness. If the official de-Stalinization was characterized as a return to a Leninism uncontaminated by Stalinism—not realizing that Leninism itself, if it ever existed, had completely merged with Stalinism—then the unofficial Georgian de-Stalinization meant a return to a “national” form supposedly free from Stalinism, without realizing that the national form was not only controlled by the socialist content but also had itself changed under its influence and, to a certain extent, become the vehicle for this content. Thus, the appeal to the amalgam of myth and history in 1970s Georgian literature, in a somewhat paradoxical way, was linked directly to socialist realism, which, in turn, took advantage of the forms created by modernism, including its Georgian variant.Footnote 57
Čilaże's novel is based on the myth of the Argonauts. However, in contrast to epic and dramatic versions of the myth, it is not the Argonauts, but Colchis, at its center. The events of the first part, with a certain degree of caution, can be characterized as a national trauma: the loss of independence and the conquest of Colchis and its (fictional) capital Vani by the Cretan Empire of King Minos (the two subsequent parts of the novel are about Vani and its inhabitants under Cretan rule). Even though Soviet and post-Soviet critics did not read Čilaże as a political author, A Man Was Going Down the Road is in no small part a political novel, one that challenges the Soviet (Stalinist) interpretation of Georgian history. Behind the empire of Minos and its conquest of Colchis (completely absent in the myth), the annexation of Georgia by the Russian Empire (1801) and the Bolshevik occupation of the Georgian Democratic Republic (1921) are quite transparent. In the Georgian tradition, Čilaże was not a pioneer in projecting the myth of the Argonauts onto Georgian history: in 1893–95, Akaki Ceret‘eli wrote the drama Media, in which he transferred the action from Corinth to Colchis and interpreted the myth in a national and political vein.Footnote 58 Čilaże on the one hand epically developed Tsereteli's motifs and, on the other, radically refuted the historical-mythological narrative of The New Colchis.
At the beginning of the novel, Vani, the novel's central setting, is a flourishing port city. Dariač‘angi, the garden of Colchis's King Æëtes, is the main attraction of the city, where one part begins to bloom when the other bears fruit, indicating a cyclical, mythical time. Æëtes's Vani is a mythical paradise. The Sea and the Garden are two spatial expressions of the state of paradise. The catastrophe is outlined from the very first pages of the novel. The sea begins to recede until it finally disappears along with the garden of Dariač‘angi, transforming Vani from a blooming paradise into an impassable swamp.Footnote 59
The projection of political history onto what is happening in the novel completely overturns the Soviet narrative of Colchis. If in the Soviet myth the paradise-like state of Colchis is linked directly to the Soviet regime, which turns the swamp into a garden of paradise, then in this novel the paradise condition is projected onto pre-Soviet and pre-imperial Georgia, and its transformation into a swamp is associated with the loss of independence.
Čilaże's novel is multifaceted enough not to be reducible to a single political interpretation. However, in the context of this article, it is the political aspect of the polemic with the Stalinist historical narrative that is important. Paradoxically, it is precisely the conceptualization of pre-Soviet and pre-imperial Georgia in mythical categories before the “fall into sin” that illustrates the contamination of the national form with socialist content and the impossibility of returning to the status quo ante. In Vani's topographic order, which I will call autochthonous, any separation from the homeland, place of birth, and origin leads to a complete loss of identity, even gender, and becomes a metaphor for death.
The genealogical and topographic relationship of a person with the land that gave birth to him or her determines the locally fixed autochthonous identity. For an autochthon, movement is an ontological impossibility leading to a complete disruption of the existing order. In Georgian culture, the theme of autochthony emerges in the middle of the nineteenth century in response to the loss of independence and the imperial encoding of space.Footnote 60 The sacred coding of the autochthonous order is metaphorically associated with paradise. The paradise metaphor connects spatial and temporal orders in the autochthonous chronotype. The temporal order of the autochthonous paradigm is the immutable duration (Jan Assmann), the eternity that does not imply change, responsibility, decision, or activity.Footnote 61 In terms of its temporal structure, the autochthonous paradigm is radically extra- and anti-historical.
Čilaże does not go beyond the autochthonous paradigm in his novel, and provides neither a plot solution nor a compositional solution to the problem. The autochthonous model lacks the sort of strength that would reform the political space. The novel's central event, the retreat of the sea, is read as a logical consequence of the transfer of the autochthonous order from the mythical into the political space. In the political space, the mythical autochthonous order blocks the possibility of renewal and leads to complete isolation. The loss of the sea—the original sin of the inhabitants of Vani—can be interpreted as their inability to realize the impossibility of a mythical, autochthonous order in historical time and to get out of it.
Čilaże, while preserving the form, radically changes the content of the myth. The “national form” itself, however, has already been changed in such a way that even a radical change in the content not only, and not even so much “decolonizes” or “de-Stalinizes” the historical narrative, but is in a sense its continuation. A change in the content of a narrative is dearly bought: the replacement of one mythical content with another, it is true, is capable of forming a critique of the present, but only by idealizing the past, albeit not at the expense of (re)thinking it. Using the form of an amalgam of myth and history (common to Robak‘iże's mythical realism and the Georgian form of socialist realism), Čilaże brings it to its logical conclusion. This form turns out to be unsuitable for comprehending both historical problems and the tasks of the present.
After Socialist Realism: In Search of a New Form
In February 1972, C‘iskari began to serialize the novel by Chabua Amirejibi, Dat‘a T‘ut‘ašxia.Footnote 62 The main action of Amirejibi's novel unfolds in the Caucasus in 1885–1913. The novel's eponymous central character, Dat‘a T‘ut‘ašxia, leaves home at the age of nineteen to become an abragi (an outlaw warrior, avenger, or bandit in the Caucasus).Footnote 63 He does this not so much to hide from the police (and his cousin Mušni Zarandia, who had made a dizzying career in the gendarme corps) but to look for “the meaning of life,” or rather a principle of practical ethics.
The clash of an action-plot with a question of ethics creates the tension of the novel, the question of what principles should form the basis of human behavior when the state, law, and order are opposed to morality. Central to the novel is the question of who should own the loyalty of a person: the family, one's social circle, one's own people, nation, or homeland? Is it the state, religion, revolution, universal principles or other, yet to be discovered ones? The novel examines different models of society and behavior: from the micromodel of a realized totalitarian society (the story of Mose Zamtaraże about the colony of Ark‘ipo Set‘uri) to a victorious democracy (an episode of the riot in the Ort‘ačala prison told by Count Szegedi and Šalva T‘uxareli), the conditions of hunger and satiety, poverty and overcoming it, a withdrawal to a monastery, serving the state, revolutionary struggle, and becoming an abragi (outlaw). By experience and reflection, T‘ut‘ašxia takes the measure of the social structure not so much by a change in the social system or social status, or by overcoming social needs, but by ethical progress. For T‘ut‘ašxia, ethics is individual in principle (this alone creates a conflict between the novel and the principles of socialist realism). In the end, however, he manages to find a way for individual ethics to interact with the collective (understood as a nation/people). Although certain characters in the novel actively sympathize with the revolution and even participate in it, the general anti-imperial zeal of the novel, which is ultimately shared by even the retired chief of gendarmes, Count Szegedi, can easily be projected onto the Soviet Union. T‘ut‘ašxia's question, whether a new social system will change a person for the better (which is indeed the measure of this system), does not receive an intra-plot answer. And yet, the mention, even in passing, of 1937, which claimed the lives of several revolutionaries who took part in the Ort‘ačala riot, casts doubt on the optimistic forecasts of Kariże and the former chief of gendarmes who befriended him and apparently provided services to the revolution.
The complex interaction of Data T‘ut‘ašxia with the socialist realist novel is not limited to ethical issues. It plays out on different levels: intertextual, intra-plot, and compositional.
The figure of the noble robber was introduced into Georgian fiction by Mixeil Javaxišvili in the novel Arsen from Marabda (1932).Footnote 64 At the end of the nineteenth century, a folk epic poem was composed about the legendary robber. In printed form, it became the best-selling book in Georgia at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, issued in a huge number of editions. Arsen was a Georgian Robin Hood (“takes from the rich, gives to the poor”) and quickly became a figure of popular social justice. Javaxišvili made Arsen in his novel the forerunner of the revolution, contributing to its victory even though he died before it happened. Dat‘a T‘ut‘ašxia rejects this simple model of social justice.
Amirejibi's Data T‘ut‘ašxia is not just a noble robber on an ethical quest. The surname T‘ut‘ašxia comes from the word t‘ut‘ašxa, the day of the moon, Monday in Megrelian (one of the languages of the South Caucasian group), which is associated with Saint George, the patron saint of Georgia.Footnote 65 T‘ut‘ašxia is inscribed into the gallery of heroes symbolizing pre-Soviet Georgia, but Amirejibi interprets this allegorical image differently from his predecessors. In The Abduction of the Moon, which is about the end of pre-revolutionary Georgia, Taraš Emxvari, acting as a figuration of St. George, retains only the external attributes of chivalry and is devoid of any active principle. T‘ut‘ašxia returns the active principle to Georgian literature. The novels have a mythological motif of brothers. Looking as alike as twins, Dat‘a T‘ut‘ašxia and Mušni Zarandia personify good and evil (the demonic nature of Zarandia is emphasized in the novel). Unlike The Abduction of the Moon, however, the demonic principle does not prevail. T‘ut‘ašxia's death in the waters of the Black Sea also echoes the death of Emxvari in the Inguri River. Emxvari's death is a sign of his disillusionment: he commits suicide, seeing it as the only way out and not wanting to embrace the main currents of the twentieth century: communism or fascism. T‘ut‘ašxia, initially not linking his life and ethics with the ethics of the collective, commits suicide, hiding the parricide committed by his son, an act orchestrated by Zarandia, not just resisting evil, but transforming it, according to the new ethical principle he had found, into good, and his own death into martyrdom.
Even though there are mythical allusions at the plot level, the actual mythical plan of the novel has been moved beyond the plot frame into the epigraphs that precede both the novel as a whole and each of its four parts. They are taken from a fictional fourteenth-century manuscript whose sublime, almost liturgical stylistic register signals their particular importance.Footnote 66 The Georgian literary critic Revaz Siraże believed that the five epigraphs together yield a “mythical novella,” and he used this “novella” as a key to interpreting the novel.Footnote 67
Despite the fact that the epigraphs echo the novel's action, the mythical reading of the novel, in contrast to the novels of Robak‘iże, and to a lesser extent those of Gamsaxurdia and Čilaże, is not privileged. If in the plot of the novels of mythical and socialist realism myth took away the reality of history, replacing it with ahistorical meaning or pseudo-authentic fiction, then in Dat‘a T‘ut‘ašxia, despite the presence of a mythical plan, history regains this reality. T‘ut‘ašxia's life and work are open to the future and are not predetermined by the original myth. On the contrary, solving a task in an open life creates the possibility of a mythical reading of his character. Unlike Čilaże, Amirejibi chooses not to challenge the Stalinist narrative within a form that amalgamates myth and history, but rather to search for a new form that is not contaminated with the Stalinist narrative.
If the popularity of Data T‘ut‘ašxia was won by the charisma of its action hero, then its significance for Georgian, and possibly Soviet literature as well, lies primarily in its form. The novel is not only polyphonic in the Bakhtin sense, but also multi-perspectival: it has twenty-one storytellers of different social origins and education, from a worker to an aristocrat, from an anarchist revolutionary to a gendarme chief. In addition, the novel contains intelligence reports, memoirs, love letters, and interrogation transcripts; it combines written and oral genres, uses a huge stylistic palette of sociolects, dialects, and idiolects, and employs stylistic registers ranging from the sublime medieval-chronicle-style language of the epigraphs to the “low” thugs’ language.
From the point of view of the narrative instance, the theme of the novel is set by the former chief of the Caucasian gendarmes, a descendant of the Russified Hungarian counts, General Szegedi. For Szegedi, T‘ut‘ašxia and Zarandia serve as an illustration of his ethical theses: “The value of any accomplishment is determined by the morality of the one who accomplished it” and “Two men equally gifted may be quite different morally, and each uses the gifts granted him in his own way.”Footnote 68
An unnamed storyteller who as a child took lessons from Szegedi and lived out his life after the Sovietization of Georgia in the Tbilisi district of Sololaki, teaching German and French is responsible for the composition of the novel. Sometime after Szegedi's death, his former student finds fragments of a manuscript and decides to restore the lost parts by interviewing figures named in the manuscript. The multiplication of the narrative instances shifts the emphasis of the essay on Szegedi's ethics, but, at the same time, Szegedi's notes hold together stories that could be read as independent novellas, giving them a general meaning.
The composition of the novel itself is a challenge to socialist realism from a formal point of view: the socialist realist novel built the plot from the standpoint of an already known, certain future, and a single point of view—that of the party—determined the content. In a socialist realist novel, this single viewpoint was matched by a single narrative instance, in most cases an auctorial narrator.Footnote 69 From a formal standpoint, the proliferation of points of view and the transformation of historical, social, or ethical issues into controversial ones went completely beyond the framework of socialist realism. Although Amirejibi, like Čilaże, tried to convey a mythical interpretation of Georgian history, the polyphonic and multi-perspectival form he chose did not make it possible to give the novel a single, stable, uncontested (from the viewpoint of the past or the future, or extratemporal) meaning, not only from the point of view of the Soviet or the national narrative, but also of any “metanarrative” (Jean-François Lyotard) in general.Footnote 70
In this article, I construct a history of the “national form” of Georgian socialist realism in the light of a theoretical question: was a national (peripheral) socialist realism possible, or did it only vary the forms created in the center? And, if it was possible, then what were its specifics, its differences from “central” socialist realism? Furthermore, did it have a reverse impact on multinational Soviet literature? I demonstrated that “peripheral” socialist realism not only varied the forms created in the center but also generated its own forms in a complex interaction of national tradition, modernism (national, European, and Russian), and central socialist realism.
A form that is specific to Georgian socialist realism, the “Great Georgian Novel,” an amalgam of history and myth that interprets the history of Georgia, its “metanarrative,” was appropriated by socialist realism for the specific purpose of rewriting the historical narrative of Georgia and including it in the Soviet historical project. I pointed out the blurring of boundaries between myth and history in the literature of Georgian socialist realism exemplified by the poetic collection The New Colchis (the historicization of mythology) and the historical novels of Konstantine Gamsaxurdia (the mythologization of history). Gamsaxurdia's choice of the historical novel marks the borderline of the transition from modernism to socialist realism. The apparent retreat from the present into history transformed the history of Georgia into a full-fledged, closed, mythical space, fenced off from the present and the future. At the same time, the present and the future were completely dissolved in the Soviet project and the figure of Stalin.
Literary “de-Stalinization” began in the early 1970s with the challenge to the socialist realist narrative of Georgian history within the framework of the “Great Georgian Novel,” which I have demonstrated in the cases of novels by Ot‘ar Čilaże and Čabua Amirejibi. Moreover, Čilaże took the form already appropriated by socialist realism and attempted to change the historical narrative within its framework. Successful in the literary sense, Čilaże's experiment changed only the vector of Stalin's historical narrative, leaving its form intact. Amirejibi, on the other hand, tried to build a new form, although he remained within the framework of amalgamating myth and history.
If national modernism aimed to marry national content with new forms, Georgian socialist realism had the opposite task: to find a national form for the socialist content. The Georgian example shows the general difficulty of finding a form for content imagined as universal. From the perspective of the party leadership, the ideal form was absolutely transparent to the content, which was particularly striking in the myths of the beginning and the end of history. Since this transparency was not absolutely achievable in any form, it retained a certain degree of autonomy, which was higher in cases of literatures with long literary traditions than in cases of more recent literatures. Georgian literature/culture paid a high price in that it remained enclosed in its tradition, which made modernization after Stalinism enormously difficult.
