St. Petersburg and the Tergdaleulebi

The decisive formation: Ilia’s years at the University of St. Petersburg from 1857, the reformist ferment of the era of Alexander II’s Great Reforms, the emergence of the reform generation the Georgians called the tergdaleulebi — “those who had drunk from the Terek” — and his departure in 1861 amid the student disturbances that closed the university, returning to Georgia as the acknowledged voice of a new national program.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Capital of the Empire

In 1857 Ilia Chavchavadze enrolled in the Faculty of Law of the University of St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire and, in those years, the intellectual center of a state convulsed by the prospect of reform (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, National Archives of Georgia; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on the enrollment). He had crossed the Terek river and the Caucasus range to reach Russia — the passage that gave his generation its name — and he arrived in the capital at a moment of extraordinary intellectual openness. The defeat in the Crimean War (1856) had discredited the old Nicholaevan order; the new tsar, Alexander II, was moving toward the emancipation of the serfs (proclaimed 1861) and a wave of “Great Reforms”; and the Russian universities seethed with debate over serfdom, the peasant commune, science, nationality, and the future of a modernizing empire (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors, 2005, on the reform-era intellectual climate).

For a gifted young Georgian nobleman this was a transforming environment. Ilia read the Russian radical and reformist thinkers of the day — the criticism of Belinsky, the materialism and utilitarian ethics associated with Chernyshevsky and the “men of the sixties” — and absorbed the broader European current of liberal nationalism, the idea that a people is constituted by its language, culture, and historical consciousness, and has a right and a duty to cultivate them (Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, on Ilia’s Russian and European reading; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5). What he took from Russia was not a program to imitate but a set of tools — the modern journal, the critical essay, the standardized literary language, the voluntary society — which he would turn to specifically Georgian ends.

The Tergdaleulebi

At St. Petersburg, and in the Georgian student milieu of the capital, Ilia became the leading figure of a group of young Georgians who would reshape their nation’s culture: the tergdaleulebi. The word means, literally, “those who have drunk of the Terek” — the river that marks the passage from Georgia into Russia — and it named the generation of young Georgians who went north to be educated in the empire and came back carrying reformist and national ideas (Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, on the term and the group; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5). They were also called simply the “men of the sixties” (samotsianelebi), and within the movement Ilia’s cohort was sometimes distinguished as the pirveli dasi, the “first group,” ahead of the somewhat younger and more radical circle around Niko Nikoladze and Giorgi Tsereteli (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 2010, on the generations of the movement).

The alliance closest to Ilia was with Akaki Tsereteli, the poet, who became the second great voice of the national awakening beside him; the two are paired in Georgian memory as the twin founders of the modern national literature (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on Ilia and Akaki). What united the tergdaleulebi was a cultural-national program rather than a party platform: the renewal and standardization of the Georgian literary language, the creation of a modern Georgian press, the founding of schools and reading societies, and the awakening of national self-consciousness in a people that had lost its state and its autocephalous Church (see Russification and the Georgian Predicament; Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012).

It was in these St. Petersburg years that Ilia began to write the works that would announce the new program — his early lyric poetry and the first drafts of the prose that would become Letters of a Traveler, the manifesto of the tergdaleulebi worldview, framed as the record of his own journey home across the Terek and the mountains (Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, on Letters of a Traveler as a tergdaleulebi manifesto; see The Poetry and Prose). He also plunged into the great question that would divide his generation from the older Georgian literary establishment: the reform of the Georgian language itself, the stripping-away of dead archaisms and the forging of a living modern standard — a controversy known in Georgian letters as the struggle over “the three groups” of the language (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the language debates).

Departure in 1861

Ilia did not complete his degree. In 1861 he left the University of St. Petersburg and returned to Georgia, in the same year in which the university itself was thrown into crisis: the autumn of 1861 saw major student disturbances in St. Petersburg — protests against new restrictions on student life and association — which led the authorities to close the university temporarily and to expel or drive out many students (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5, on the context; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on his departure in 1861 amid the disturbances). [Disputed: sources vary on whether Ilia was formally expelled, left in protest, or simply departed without completing the law course amid the closure. Some accounts (e.g. the National Archives of Georgia summary) speak of his having finished his studies in 1861; the scholarly and encyclopedic accounts describe him leaving the university in his fourth year, in 1861, in connection with the student unrest that closed it, without taking a degree (Suny, 1994; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia). This collection reports that he left St. Petersburg in 1861 amid the disturbances and returned to Georgia, and treats the “graduated 1861” formula as a looser summary; it does not assert a formal expulsion as certain.]

Whatever its precise form, the departure was a turning point. Ilia came home in 1861 not as a lawyer but as a writer and a reformer, the recognized leader of the tergdaleulebi, carrying a program he would spend the next forty-six years building into institutions: journals, a literacy society, a bank, a body of literature, and a public leadership that would make him the central figure of the Georgian national movement (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019). The man who crossed the Terek southward in 1861 was the man his nation would later call its father.

See Also

References

  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The reform-era climate; the tergdaleulebi and the “men of the sixties”; the pirveli dasi; the 1861 context; Ilia’s return.)
  • Manning, Paul. Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. (The term tergdaleulebi; Ilia’s reading; Letters of a Traveler as a manifesto; the intellectual world of the movement.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Ilia and Akaki Tsereteli; the generations of the movement; the language-reform debates.)
  • Jones, Stephen F. Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883–1917. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. (The reform-era intellectual climate.)
  • Ilia Chavchavadze. Wikipedia. (Enrollment 1857; departure in 1861 amid the student disturbances; the disputed form of his leaving — used to locate dates, cross-checked against Suny.)
  • Ilia Chavchavadze. National Archives of Georgia (archive.gov.ge). (The St. Petersburg law studies; the “1861” summary.)
  • Tsipuria, Bela. “Ilia Chavchavadze.” In Great Immortality, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason. Leiden: Brill, 2019. (Ilia as leader of the national movement.)