THE HISTORY OF RELATIONS between Russia and the republic of Georgia is
perhaps the richest example we possess of Russia’s cultural impact on
the Eurasian peripheries of the former Soviet Union. Beginning with the
Russian annexation of eastern Georgia in 1801, the Russian-Georgian
encounter reveals a legacy of political control and cultural ascendancy,
but also vigorous cross-fertilization. The Russian-Georgian dialogue
intensified in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1917, particularly
after Georgia’s absorption into the Soviet Union in 1921, which ended
her short-lived political independence but arguably strengthened her
sense of cultural specificity. In straddling the histories of both
nineteenth-century imperialism and twentieth-century communism,
Russian-Georgian relations represent a unique case of what Mary Louise
Pratt has called the “contact zone,” a social space where “cultures
meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly
asymmetrical relations of power.”
In the Russian-Georgian case, as in many others, these asymmetries of
power imposed a cultural dynamic that had very different implications
for each side. Both the tsarist and Soviet states pursued a civilizing
and modernizing mission in the Caucasus, although the Soviet Union,
unlike its predecessor, remained ideologically committed to the nominal
parity and cultural self-sufficiency of its constitutive national
republics. Yet before and even after the revolution this mission was
curiously inverted in the Russian cultural imagination, whereby
Georgia’s historical antiquity, natural beauty, cultural vibrancy, and
traditions of hospitality were frequently celebrated alongside, or even
in defiance of, the modernizing forces that were seeking to modify or
erase them. The region has enjoyed a privileged status in Russian
culture ever since the heyday of Russian romanticism (1820s-1840s), when
literary canon-maker Vissarion Belinskii christened the Caucasus the
“cradle” of the Russian muses. From that time, Georgia has appeared to
numberless travelers from the north as a kind of locus amoenus, a
respite from the climatic rigors and political constraints of the
Russian metropole, as well as from the markedly more challenging
physical and ethnic contours of the North Caucasus.
A region strikingly different yet unthreatening in its diversity and
natural abundance, Georgia quickly acquired a near mythic status in
Russian consciousness that the upheavals of the twentieth century did
little to dislodge. In fact, the Georgian myth was further consolidated
during the brief period of Georgia’s independence (1918-1921), when
Russian artists and poets affiliated with various modernist tendencies
flocked to the Georgian capital Tbilisi. During the ensuing decades,
Soviet cultural policy updated and celebrated Russia’s Georgian myth as
an expression of the newly “fraternal relations” among the peoples of
the Soviet Union that were said to have replaced the imperial divide. To
corroborate this ideology it was necessary to express Russian-Georgian
cultural ties according to a narrow set of approved literary
themes—socialist construction and Soviet nationalities policy—which in
the 1920s together unleashed “the most extravagant celebration of ethnic
diversity that any state had ever financed.” Yet the marriage of the
Georgian myth to these newer ideological imperatives remained at best an
awkward alliance, rearticulating without effacing entirely the complex
inheritances of literary romanticism and modernism, along with their
respective historical contexts of colonial expansion and imperial
collapse.
The Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak’s “discovery” of Georgia
during the 1930s is a case in point. Occurring at a time of
unprecedented social change instigated by Stalin’s policies of
industrialization and collectivist reorganization, Pasternak’s Georgian
encounter is chiefly remembered both for the creative and personal
renewal it precipitated and for the friendships that blossomed between
the Russian poet and his Georgian counterparts. This renewal was
manifested not only in Pasternak’s original work, but also in an intense
collaborative effort to translate into Russian the poetry of Pasternak’s
new Georgian friends, most notably T’itsian T’abidze (1895-1937), a
founding figure of Georgian poetic modernism who would be arrested and
executed during the great purges.
In the received accounts of the post-Stalin era, the Pasternak-T’itsian
encounter has been examined primarily as a testament to the ability of
creative talent and personal loyalty to withstand or negotiate the
appalling pressures of the times. As historically informative as these
accounts are, however, they are limited by their generic frame: literary
biography elaborated within the well-defined socio-cultural context of
ascendant Stalinism. As such they tend to pit solitary individuals of
genius against the inexorable if unpredictable machinery of the Soviet
state. We still lack a more precise and nuanced sense both of the
cross-cultural poetics of the Russian-Georgian contact zone and the
historically embedded as well as immediate literary dynamics and
cultural politics implied by its textual—or, better still, intertextual—unfolding.