Eros and Empire in Russian Literature about Georgia

Abstract

In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said'sOrientalism.Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between “us” and the “Asiatics” produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In “Ammalat- Bek,” for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man.

The horizons of Medea: economies and cosmologies of dispossession in Georgia

“…In his 1890 play Media , Akaki Tsereteli, the Georgian writer and public figure, presented Medea as a naïve woman who falls in love with Jason, contrary to the original version of the mythology in which she is treacherous (Tsereteli [1890]: 432). Tsereteli in this way tried to subvert Russian colonial representations of Georgia, which depicted the country as a sensual and treacherous woman in need of protection and domination (Layton : 196). In his memoirs, the German writer, journalist, and translator Arthur Leist depicted the Medea mythology debates in late nineteenth‐century Georgia.…”

Strangers in a Strange Land

“…The dialogue with Russian and Georgian Romantics is done primarily through intertextuality of the landscape itself, an aestheti-cized landscape which more than any other was fraught with the political categories of colonial imaginative geography that Chavchavadze wishes to engage and revise. An Aesopian Discourse of Nature: Talking Politics through Aesthetics Political engagement with Russian and Georgian Romantic imaginative geographies, which already reflected a strongly Orientalist essentializing mapping of geography to humanity (Layton 1992(Layton , 1994(Layton , 1997, occurred on the ground of aesthetics of the very natural landscape that Romanticism had invested with aesthetic or expressive value. Nature, then, assumes for Georgian discourse in this period a fundamentally political role.…”

“…In Russian Romantic Orientalist discourse, these two locales exhibit very different forms of alterity and suggesting very different colonial projects. As Layton (1992Layton ( , 1994 argues, Georgia, though "civilized" and "Christian" was constructed by Russian Orientalism as a languid Oriental female, indeed, Georgia forms a classical Oriental counterpart to European Russia. 9 By contrast, the Caucasus was the exemplary locus of masculinity, full of masculine tribesmen to be fought and emulated, and not a few lovely mountaineer maids widely rumored "to be very well disposed toward travelers" (Pushkin [1835], 139; more generally see Layton 1994Layton , 1997.…”

“…These aestheticized and expressive spatial qualities are in turn aligned with gendered qualities of person, "the sublime with the masculine and the beautiful with the feminine" (Chard 1999, 117-18). Thus, Russian Romantics like Pushkin and Griboyedov saw the masculine sublime primarily in the gloomy crags and defiles of the Caucasus Mountains (home of fierce, warlike people like the Chechens), opposed to the feminized, Orientalized aesthetics of the beautiful that typified the Georgian plains (Layton 1992).…”

“…For the exceptionally privileged position of Georgian gentry, see Suny (1979). For Russian colonial representations of Georgia and the Caucasus, see Layton (1992Layton ( , 1994Layton ( , 1997 and Ram and Shatirishvili (2004). Whereas Russian intelligentsia trace their genealogy to an emergent group of de-classe intellectuals (raznochintsy), Georgian intelligentsia arose out of a much more solidly urban gentry milieu, and to this day, many postsocialist Georgian intelligentsia see their heritage as being essentially aristocratic (but see Jones 2005, chapters 1-2).…”