Georgian Poets Research Articles

Caucasian Multiculturalism, as the Burden and the Opportunity and the Private Archive of Russian Empire's Georgian General

The Caucasus is considered as one of the difficult geopolitical regions. It includes Georgia, which differs from other Caucasian ethnics in religious-cultural context. Georgia, which has been strongly influenced by Persia and Ottoman Turkey for centuries, as well as by Europe, fully becomes a part of Russian Empire and gets under even stronger European influence. The 19th century Caucasus was characterized by multiculturalism that, in general, causes the atrophy of values and the marginalization of national components, as a result. The subject of our research is the private archive, namely, 700 letters of Grigol Orbeliani (1804-1883), Georgian poet, military person and public figure, the General of the Russian army. In this material, we can find the various concepts of self-identity. In this regard, it is significant to analyze what place was taken by Russian on the one hand and Eastern on the other hand phraseology and sayings in his mentality. How does Orbeliani understand and develop the phenomenon of “homeland”; what forms of tolerance does he reveal; what is his perception on Imperial, Caucasian and Georgian contexts, and so on. These very letters give us the opportunity to find not only Orbelianian contours of self-identity concept, but contributes to our attempts of marking human groups and societies’ ethnic and religious identities as well.

Translations of Georgian poet N. Baratashvili into Russian Language in the Aspect of Cross-Cultural Communication

Common fact that literary translation is a kind of literary process, which itself is the beginning of a new literary life and thinking, promotes cross-cultural communication, concerns creative translation of the Georgian romantic poet of the 19th century Nikoloz Baratashvili (1817-1845) on various languages. The translations of N. Baratashvili were not published during the poet's life. The process of translating his works becomes more active especially after the 1920s of the last century. Baratashvills works were translated into Russian both by Georgian and Russian poets and translators: V. Gaprindashvili, B. Pasternak, G.Tsagareli, M. Dudin and others. All-Union competition, announced in 1966, gave possibility to poets and literary critics of various nationalities to introduce the Georgian masterpiece, Merani, to foreign readers relying on the Russian translation. Our article highlights some Russian translations of the works of N. Baratashvili, which is still great importance in the development of intercultural communication.

Global Challenges of Earth Protection and Philosophic Foundation of Cherokee Indian Religion: the 19th Century American Transcendentalism and Georgian “Gialove” in Poetry

Environmental issues now present a greater challenge for the global society than everand demand better cooperation among nations around the world to save the planet andhumans from inevitable disaster which may be caused by environmental degradation.Air and water pollution, depletion of soil, loss of biodiversity, extinction of many speciesare the result of inhuman and irrational attitudes towards the earth and the gifts of nature.Civilization means more people demanding higher standards of living which hasdirect disastrous impacts on world ecosystems because it stimulates exploitation ofrenewable resources, such as fresh water, forests, and fertile topsoil.This article ecological problems caused by the brutal consumption of natural resourcesand the attempt of international community to protect the earth; also it argues that manyancient civilizations, and among them aboriginal Cherokee people, worshiped universalspirit of nature and tried to maintain balance with nature. Based on the analysis offamous essay Nature by the 19th century American essayist and poet Ralph WaldoEmerson and the short stories by Georgian poet and writer Vazha Pshavela, the articlereveals the authors’ philosophy of nature interpreted as a Universal being.The central idea of the paper is that the most important for mankind is to restore “wholeness”with nature and save it from the flaws and distractions imposed by “civilized society”in the post-industrial era. “Gialove” - is an Earth-affection philosophy, which wasbrilliantly demonstrated in Vazha’s poetry and stories.

The Aspects of Civic Consciousness in Georgian Literature

AbstractOnly society, equipped with civic consciousness will retain identity and take a stand in the modern global world. The research aims at revealing distinctive characters of Georgian way of thinking based on the examples from scientific works and fiction.Interesting explanation regarding the essence of citizenship is given by a great Georgian scientist Saint Grigol Peradze in his series of letters “Content of real citizenship” (interpretation of The Lord’s Prayer - Our Father). He postulates:” Aim of citizen’s life and of citizenship itself should be God”. Civic Consciousness in the history of Georgian literature originates from hagiography and immediately comprises double service. Hagiography hero serves for conversion of physical and spiritual “desert” into “city”.The poetry of great Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela possesses all characteristics of highly developed civic consciousness. Vazha-Pshavela is considered to be “a poet of future” (critic Tamaz Chkhenkeli), also “a poet of soul” (Grigol Kiknadze), because his creative work is directed towards spiritual forces of a human and serve for spiritual prosperity.

Tbilisi Evening

Tbilisi Evening Titsian Tabidze (bio) Translated by Rebecca Gould (bio) March 15, 1927 Tbilisi evening almost died of crying with the music’s voice. The strings carried the heart’s sorrows from the river’s left bank. That’s how the raft man sang, his pine logs bound with swans, his sudden refrain reduced to new hopes’ ashes. My still heart keens with what I have or what I had, what was cast into the fire as I stand naked on the black mountain. I praise the wind of industry. I want to destroy the old country. Icarus’s honeyed wings were melted by the sun’s rays. Forgive me, if I cry for the milky dew of Tbilisi mornings. I envy the flute-player raised on heroic poetry. [End Page 37] I recline on the old raft I cry, bound to the pine swans. My song sings past the old refrain. I live with these dreams. [End Page 38] Titsian Tabidze Titsian Tabidze (1895–1937) was one of most eloquent and sophisticated poets of the literary modernist movement that dominated Georgian literature during the early decades of the twentieth century. Born in rural western Georgia, he passed most of his adult life in cosmopolitan Tbilisi, where he became close friends with Russian and Georgian poets, including his translator Boris Pasternak (winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature), Sergei Esenin (d. 1925), and Osip Mandelstam (d. 1938). Like many Russian and Georgian poets of his era, Titsian perished in a purge directed by Stalin’s police chief Lavrenty Beria. In Titsian’s case the stimulus for his execution was his refusal to denounce his close friend and fellow poet, Paolo Iashvili. To date, Titsian’s work has only been systematically translated into Russian, but an interview with his descendants is available in English at https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/tabidze_8_1_10/. Rebecca Gould Rebecca Gould is a translator of Persian, Russian, and Georgian poetry as well as a scholar, critic, and writer. Her work has appeared in the Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, and Literary Imagination, among many other venues. Her translated volume After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi will be published by Northwestern University Press. Gould has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of Literary Translators, and is currently an assistant professor in the humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press

The Literary Origins of the Georgian Feast: The Cosmopolitan Poetics of a National Ritual

SUMMARY: Harsha Ram explores the emergence of the Georgian feast, the supra , and its appropriation by modernist discourses in Georgian culture in late imperial discourses. By carefully tracing textual constructions of the supra , Ram argues that it emerged from the cross-fertilizing influences of the ethnic mix of Tbilisi and the poetic encounters of the Georgian modernists with high cultures of Britain and Russia. Ram sees the supra and the literary toast as participating in articulations of aesthetic power, popular sentiment, and political authority. The Georgian feast, which the modernists cultivated as one of the pillars of Georgian cultural identity, thus emerged from the encounters between Russian and Georgian poets and their respective contexts of military service, noble status, and imperial hierarchies. Ram envisions the multiple and complex origins of the Georgian feast as evidence to overcome the model of compensatory nationalism on the one hand, and Partha Chatterjee’s model of cultural difference as the nodal point of anticolonial difference. These multiple origins and contexts of the Georgian feast suggest an experience of celebration and resistance that cannot be reduced solely to the opposition of nation to empire, or to the derivation of nation from empire. In the absence of a bourgeois public sphere, the conspiratorial societies of the Decembrists, like the festive life of Tiflis’s taverns, served as spaces in which to imagine diverse kinds of belonging that were not primarily or exclusively national. Literary forms and the social relations they rhetorically performed or poetically disguised reveal the nonsynchronous cultural practices and social imaginaries that coexisted in the space of empire. As such, they also bore the seeds of the multiple political possibilities that ultimately lay before the diverse subjects of imperial Russia. The story of the supra reveals not only its hybrid literary origins but also the multiple cosmopolitan social ambiences in which feasting and toasting took place, from Tbilisi’s taverns to the officers’ quarters of the imperial armies under the command of the generals Ermolov or Paskevich. Only careful historical restoration of these cosmopolitan contexts can help avoid a reductively national or imperial reading of this cultural phenomenon. В публикуемой статье Харша Рам рассматривает возникновение грузинского пира – супры, и его интерпретацию в позднеимперских модернистских дискурсах грузинской культуры. Внимательно анали-зируя текстуальную историю супры, Рам приходит к выводу, что она возникла из этнической смеси, характерной для Тбилиси, где элементы разных культур обогащали друг друга, с одной стороны, и из поэти-ческого освоения грузинскими модернистами высоких английской и русской культуры – с другой. Супра и литературный тост, таким образом, предстают одновременно как способы артикуляции эстетической и политической власти и массовых настроений. Грузинский пир, который модернисты культивировали как одну из основ грузинской культурной идентичности, на самом деле был результатом взаимодействия между русскими и грузинскими поэтами в контекстах военной службы, дво-рянской культуры и имперских иерархий. Эта множественная и сложная генеалогия грузинского пира служит Раму аргументом против модели компенсаторного национализма и одновременно – против трактовки Парты Чаттерджи, согласно которой культурное различие составляет саму суть антиколониального различия. Множественные источники и контексты грузинского пира породили опыт празднования и сопро-тивления, который невозможно свести исключительно к оппозиции между нацией и империей или только к имперской генеалогии нации. В отсутствие буржуазной публичной сферы секретные общества де-кабристов, также как праздная среда тифлисских кабаков, служили пространством, в котором формировались различные понимания при-надлежности, не являвшиеся преимущественно или исключительно национальными. Литературные формы и риторически представляемые или поэтически маскируемые ими социальные отношения отражают несинхронные культурные практики и типы социального воображения, сосуществовавшие на пространстве империи. В этом качестве они нес-ли в себе целый спектр потенциальных политических возможностей, доступных разнообразным подданным Российской империи. Таким образом, история супры не только выявляет его гибридное литератур-ное происхождение, но и позволяет увидеть и понять множественные космополитичные социальные среды, в которых происходили пиры и произносились тосты – от кабаков Тбилиси до казарм, в которых рас-полагались подразделения имперской армии под командованием Ермо-лова или Паскевича. Только тщательная историческая реконструкция этих космополитических контекстов позволит избежать национальной редукции или имперского прочтения культурного феномена супры.

The Achievement of Randall Swingler

Randall Swingler was a poet in a very English literary tradition. He was the last of the Georgian poets, writing lovingly about the English countryside long after the Modernist urbanisation of poetry. He believed that poetry was the voice of the people. And he was the inheritor and the bearer of a radical vision of England rooted in the English rural landscape and the common people. Standing in direct line of descent from Langland, Winstanley, Milton, Blake, Morris and Edward Thomas, he was a late poet of Old Dissent, combining a love of the English countryside with Christian fellowship and an English Puritan's hatred of privilege and power, property and money. For Randall Swingler, poetry had a moral and a political urgency, a responsibility to testify against cant and hypocrisy, and to bear witness to a Utopian vision of an open-shirted, classless Commonwealth which would one day liberate human living, loving and creativity. Swingler was perhaps the last writer of substance to be able to speak from within this native, egalitarian, pastoral tradition. But it was not an easy task, even in Swingler's lifetime, to hold on to such an uncompromising view of poetic life. His poetry brought him no material rewards, and little critical attention. Having given away his inheritance, he lived for most of his life on the edge of poverty, repudiating all the privileges of his class in order to live among the common people. He spent the Second World War in the ranks, refusing to apply for the commission which would have separated him from ordinary soldiers and the necessary horror of fighting. Because of his refusal to change his opinions when they became unfashionable, he was witch-hunted at the BBC, attacked by Orwell, and

A reader's guide to Edwardian literature

Part 1 Introduction - Edwardianism: the literary tradition the context of manliness the search for an audience. Part 2 imperial identity: fiction and empire Conrad - Heart of Darkness Conrad - Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent Kipling - Kim critics of the Empire - Shaw, Wells, Forster. Part 3 condition of England: liberal commentaries - Tressell, London the country house tradition - Tono-Bungay. Part 4 importance of parricide: Bennett - Clayhanger narratives of parricide - Synge defeated fathers - Butler, Gosse, Shaw, Barker, Barrie failed rebellions - Galsworthy, Forster novels of departure - Lawrence, Joyce. Part 5 New women and mothers of empire: Wells - Ann Veronica the context of male writing - Shaw, Bennett, Lawrence feminist writers - Robins, Schreiner woman as child - children's books, Mansfield female consciousness - Richardson, Woolf. Part 6 Poems, audiences and anthologies: Hardy - poems 1912-13 and others Yeats - the struggle for objectivity Kipling and large audiences imagism and impressionism georgian poets, Thomas, Mew. Part 7 new novel: James - The Wings of the Dove the James-Wells dispute Conrad and the multiplied producer after 1914.

The Medieval Parsonage House, Coningsby, Lincolnshire

SummaryThis house is shown, from both structural and documentary evidence, to have been built c. 1345 by William Hillary, a rector with Staffordshire connections. Of his work enough remains to show that it was of aisled design, with an open service bay at the lower end; the two-bay hall had a base-cruck truss. The surviving woodwork is of very high quality. The two-storey cross wing, later than the hall and originally timber-framed, is cased in brick, and this brickwork is ascribed, on both docu mentary and archaeological evidence, to yohn Croxby, rector 1460–92 and namesake of the first clerk of works of Tattershall Castle.The later alterations to the house are worked out from structural and documentary evidence (terriers, probate inventories); later rectors, including two minor Georgian poets, are described. The paper is illustrated by plans, sections, reconstructions and photographs. It concludes with a distribution map of base-cruck halls and comments on the social context of this type of construction. Dr. Rogers has contributed the historical evidence in this paper; the other authors are responsible for the account of the structure.

W. J. Turner, a Georgian poet

W. J. Turner, a Georgian poet