Urban spaces after socialism: ethnographies of public places in Eurasian cities

Strangers in a Strange Land

“…Elsewhere, Orbeliani even more savagely attacks the nonaristocratic outsider Mesxi, criticizing the language of Droeba (in a satirical poem entitled "for the ten-year jubilee of Droeba" [Orbeliani 1959(1876, 75]) as "the language of the bazaar, of an Armenian." Ironically enough, this urban "language of the bazaar" that Orbeliani disdains in his public persona is precisely the language that Orbeliani would adopt in his private cycle of "oriental" urban muxambazi poetry (Ram 2007, Manning 2004, 2009c, Manning and Shatirishvili 2011.…”

“…The often related use of playful pseudonyms that are sometimes kennings of one's true name (cryptograms or cryptonyms) that creates an esoteric discourse among intelligentsia we can call a "bohemia." Indeed, Ioseb Grishashvili, the Georgian author responsible for creating a folklorized modernist social mythology of "Old Tbilisi" as a "literary Bohemia" (Grishashvili 1963(Grishashvili [1927, was also both a prodigious user of pseudonyms [having over one hundred personae] as well as a connoisseur and expert on Georgian cryptograms and pseudonyms [Grishashvili 1969[Grishashvili , 1987 (on Old Tbilisi, see Manning 2004, Manning and Shatirishvili 2011). Both of these are related in a sense as being directly or indirectly by-products (like "Aesopian language" discussed above) of state supervision.…”

“…4. See Ram 2007, Manning 2009c, Manning and Shatirishvili 2011. I am indebted to Shunsuke Nozawa for directing my attention to the way that being a "nobody" is itself a crucial way to engage in print culture both as writer and as one written about.…”

“…3. This spurning of Persian forms in Orbeliani's lyric was only characteristic of his public poetry; his private "bohemian" poetry instead typically used precisely these Persian lyric forms like the muxambazi (Manning 2004, Ram 2007, Manning and Shatirishvili 2011. It is arguable that Chavchavadze missed the political charge of adopting lyric forms for Romantics of this period, which allowed them to express a "lyric subjectivity" coeval with Russians and other Europeans Shatirishvili 2004, Manning 2008).…”