დაკარგული კონტექსტები by Giorgi Maisuradze

In the 1930s and 40s, when the Stalinist national canon was established, ethnogenesis, historiography, and literary history lent themselves to ideological instrumentalization, as even the prenational and prehistoric were nationalized. Thus, the representation of Russian history in a 1937 school textbook began with Urartu, the ancient Oriental Empire in Transcaucasia, which was considered the first ‘multi-ethnic state’ on the territory of the subsequent USSR. Georgia was not only chosen as a paradigmatic example of such a research perspective because Stalin’s home was given a lot of attention in the official discourses, but also because, with its long history of tradition, it was always possible to stage Georgian culture-and as it were the Soviet civilization-as particularly archaic. A cultural studies analysis of such discursive, iconographic, and symbolic forms of representation of the National in the Stalin era revealed how the culture of the Soviet National was constructed as genealogical with the aid of specific operations (such as archaisizing, simplification, mythopoesis) and figures (‘Stalin as the father of nations’, ‘Motherland’, ‘Big Brother’).

This metaphor refers to a wide range of cultural practices: from massive dispossession and forced relocation to growing cohesion up to the escape from forced communal living after 1991.

Slezkine) with many rooms, where different nations and nationalities lived together under one roof. The project examined the metaphor of the Soviet Empire as a “communal apartment” (Y. The arena which the Georgian culture had entered-the Soviet Union-was at that time, according to Abašije, a place ruled by terror and violence, while success in industrialization and modernization was celebrated in public discourse and the country was praised as a haven of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘friendship among the peoples.’ He claimed that Russia no longer set the perception of Georgia, instead, it would be the Georgian culture itself that would determine the strategies of its self-representation through northern expansion.

“Georgia has crossed the crest of the Caucasus” -with these words, the Georgian poet and longtime chairman of the Georgian Writers’ Union, Irakli Abašije (1909–1992) retrospectively signaled in 1991 a new dispositive for the cultural situation in the 1930s.

დაკარგული კონტექსტები by Giorgi Maisuradze