Abstract
This essay examines attitudes to Europe in the prose fiction of Georgia, one of the many countries in the Caucasus and on the fringe of Central Asia which are marginalised in cultural and political discussions of the continent. Despite emerging in the sixth century AD, Georgian prose only noticed Europe after Russian annexation in 1801 and only started to set novels in the region during the 1920s. After the hiatus of the Soviet period, writers began a more sustained engagement with western Europe, viewing the region critically (for ignoring the horrors of Russian totalitarianism) or satirically (for being obsessed by sex and money). As the essay illustrates through a study of Otar Chiladze’s Avelumi (Avelum, 1995), the experience of and disillusionment with the West often dominates contemporary Georgian fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
Khintibidze, Georgian-Byzantine Literary Contacts, trans. by Arrian Tchanturia (1969; Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1996), pp. 192–291.
- 2.
Javakhishvili, Kvachi, trans. by Donald Rayfield (1925; Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive, 2015), p. 238.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 263. The passage continues: ‘I can live in any developed country. I love culture, civilization, progress, clean streets, a nice tidy apartment, really good entertainments; I like a well-starched shirt, a top hat, patent-leather shoes; I love women of good breeding who are scrubbed and bathed, wear silk underwear, and change it at least twice a week; I can’t understand how anyone can live in a town where there aren’t several colleges, a dozen theatres, arts and sciences, a town where intellectual life is extinguished or never existed’ (ibid., pp. 263–4).
- 4.
Ibid., p. 451.
- 5.
Javakhishvili, Arsena marabdeli (Tbilisi: Pederatsia, 1935), p. 571.
- 6.
Chiladze, Avelum, trans. by Donald Rayfield (1995; London: Garnett Press, 2013), p. 59.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 68.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 90.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 122.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 272.
- 11.
See ibid., pp. 8, 15, 46, 122, 154, 176, 226, 227.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 55.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 266.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 212.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 177.
- 16.
This subject matter was soon exhausted, as shown by his monologue K’agdata in jorjia (Once a Time in Georgia, 2008), which compared 1990s Georgia to the world of Hollywood westerns and New York gangsters. Morchiladze has since relied on sci-fi and alternative history for inspiration.
- 17.
Bughadze can be as imaginative as Borges, as illustrated by his story ‘Ertze met’i, orze nak’lebi’ (The Round Table, 2011). This is set in a restaurant where the menu and waitresses offer not food, but conversations (local news and obituaries, world politics, flirtations, blazing marital rows), after which the contented diners can satisfy baser appetites at MacDonald’s. Bughadze can also set out to shock: ‘P’irveli rusi’ (The First Russian, 2003) portrays Prince Iuri Bogoliubsky (the drunken, treacherous, sodomitical consort rashly chosen by the court for the young Queen Tamar in 1185) with such contempt that the Georgian parliament and Patriarch felt constrained to apologise to Russia.
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Rayfield, D. (2016). Blowing Hot and Cold: Georgia and the West. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Novel and Europe. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_14
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