From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism

Slavonic and East European Review, 98, 1, 2020 REVIEW ESSAY From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism HARSHA RAM Papashvili, Giorgi (ed.). K’ult’ura da mkhat’vruli tskhovreba Sakartvelos p’irvel respublik’ashi (1918–1921) / Culture and Artistic Life in the First Georgian Republic (1918–1921). Chubinashvili National Research Centre for Georgian Art History, Tbilisi, 2018. 171 pp. Illustrations. Annotations. Sources. Price unknown. Chepyzhov, Pavel. New Georgian Book Design, 1920s–30s / Novyi gruzinskii knizhnyi dizain 1920-kh–1930-kh godov / Kartuli ts’ignis akhali dizaini 1920–1930-ian ts’lebshi. Edited by Ketevan Kintsurashvili. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw and Bookvica, Moscow, 2018. 311 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Biographies of artists. Bibliography. List of books. $60.00: €52.00:£45.00 (paperback). It is by now well-established that the Georgian capital Tiflis — as Tbilisi was then widely known — became a major regional centre of modernist cultural production in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. At once the administrative capital of Russian Transcaucasia and a trading hub linking Iran to Russia and Europe, Tiflis harboured an ethnically diverse population deeply engaged in the production, circulation and consumption of goods, fashions and ideas. In 1918 the city became the capital of the Georgian Democratic Republic (1918–21) which, under the aegis of the Georgian Mensheviks — moderate rivals to Lenin’s Bolsheviks — gave rise to the first social-democratic experiment in history on a national scale. Offering provisional respite from the Russian civil war raging north of the Caucasus mountains, Menshevik Tiflis allowed Russian artists to mingle with their Georgian and Armenian counterparts in conditions of relative Harsha Ram is Associate Professor in Slavic and Comparative Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. HARSHA RAM 140 material abundance and cultural freedom during a short-lived but significant historical cycle which came to an abrupt end with the Bolshevik military annexation of Georgia on 25 February 1921. In few other cities of the Russian empire (one thinks of Kyiv as a rare point of comparison)1 did modernist cultural production evolve under such distinct political regimes — tsarist, Menshevik and Bolshevik — conflicting cultural ideologies — cosmopolitan as well as nativist — and literary sensibilities — symbolist, futurist, acmeist, dada and constructivist. One of the earliest writers to mythologize the cultural efflorescence of Menshevik Tiflis was Grigol Robakidze, doyen of Georgian modernism and arguably the most erudite literary intellectual of his generation. Composed during the 1920s, his unfinished novel, Falestra, evoked a recent past that — in the wake of Sovietization — seemed hauntingly remote: A strange city, Tiflis became stranger still in the years 1919 to 1920. Fugitive Russians found shelter here […]. Who wasn’t to be found in Tiflis at this time? […] It was here that the [Russian] futurists took their initial step towards dada. […] Tiflis became a city of poets. In the Café Internationale people exclaimed that henceforth only in Tiflis was poetry at all possible. [Georgian poet] Paolo Iashvili conquered the city at precisely this time, just as Arthur Rimbaud had once vanquished Paris. Scarcely did Iashvili suspect that the bohemian conquest of Tiflis would prove a greater challenge than the taking of Paris. The country was truly going to rack and ruin [iktseoda], but Tiflis was the sole city to greet this ‘collapse’ with poetic song (a manifestation, surely, of the carefree oriental or Georgian spirit?). Tiflis became a fantastical city.2 Eliding the political question of Menshevism into a diffuse intimation of impending collapse, Robakidze here sketches out the primary artistic orientations at play in revolutionary Tiflis: a cosmopolitan outlook tilted towards European — specifically Parisian — modes of bohemian sociability, a cacophony of avant-garde orientations shrilly proclaiming the primacy of poetic experimentation and a vaguely expressed but far from insignificant acknowledgement of a native ‘oriental’ sensibility. To date scholarly studies of this era have served principally to extend and detail Robakidze’s account. Overtly citing Robakidze in its very 1 See the collected volume, Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation, eds Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz, Toronto, 2010. 2 Grigol Robakidze, Falestra [uploaded 3 December 2019]. FROM MENSHEVIK TO BOLSHEVIK 141 title, Tat´iana Nikol´skaia’s ‘Fantasticheskii gorod’ elaborated the cultural contours of Menshevik Tiflis as an ‘oasis’ for artists and writers...

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