Authors
Daniel Healey1; 1 University of Oxford, UK Discussion
In this paper I explore frameworks for telling the history of modern Georgian culture, testing ideas for a new history for a contemporary public readership. Anglophone scholarly perspectives have emphasized the attachment of modernising Georgia to the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union as a critical feature determining its cultural development. According to this view, Europe came to Georgia through the lens of, or as a ‘gift’ of, Russian imperialism and later Sovietisation. One might posit a slumbering proto-Georgia awaiting the awakening kiss of a Russian prince. Alternatively, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, national characteristics such as the Georgian language and its Orthodox Christian religion, its geographic position near Ottoman and Persian neighbours, its social composition, and its ethnic and linguistic diversity, offered powerful obstacles to assimilation into modern Russian culture. In this reading modern Georgian literature, visual arts and performance arose despite the tutelage of St Petersburg and Moscow, and Georgia made its own way to Europe especially at moments when Russia was weakest. Stalinist and Soviet development imposed much that looked ‘modern’ even as it blocked free access to international currents. There are doubtless even more nuanced ways to tell this story, but the question of the relationship between empire, nation, and culture in the rise of modern Georgian culture merits exploration for modern audiences wishing to understand the current controversies surrounding this small nation at the crossroads of European and Russian spheres of influence. 
