The Journals: Sakartvelos Moambe and Iveria

The creation of a modern Georgian press as the first instrument of the national awakening: the short-lived but seminal journal Sakartvelos Moambe (Georgian Herald), founded by Ilia in 1863, and the enduring Iveria, which he launched in 1877 and edited into the twentieth century — for a generation the central platform of Georgian public life.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Why a Press Came First

When Ilia returned to Georgia in 1861, the first thing the national movement lacked was a public. A nation is in part a conversation — a body of people who read the same words, argue the same questions, and imagine themselves as one — and in the Georgia of the 1860s there was almost no modern Georgian-language press to sustain such a conversation (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5; Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, on the “publics” the journals created). The tergdaleulebi understood, from their Russian reading, that the modern journal — the “thick” literary-and-political monthly and the daily newspaper — was the instrument by which a national public is made. Ilia’s first great institutional project was therefore a press (Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012).

Sakartvelos Moambe (1863)

In 1863 Ilia founded and edited Sakartvelos Moambe — “The Georgian Herald” or “Messenger of Georgia” — a monthly journal of literature, criticism, and public affairs (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 2010, on Sakartvelos Moambe; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia). It was conceived as the flagship of the new generation: a vehicle for the reformed, living Georgian literary language, for the new critical prose, and for the debate over the nation’s future. In its pages Ilia published his own work and pressed the causes of the movement — language reform, education, the condition of the peasantry on the eve and morrow of emancipation.

The journal was short-lived. It ran only about a year before folding, defeated by the ordinary difficulties of the enterprise — a small reading public, financial strain, and the friction of imperial censorship (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the brief life of Sakartvelos Moambe). [Disputed: the phrase “Sakartvelos Moambe (1863–1877)” appears in some summaries as though the journal ran continuously to 1877; this conflates Ilia’s whole editorial career with the life of the single journal. Sakartvelos Moambe itself was a short-lived venture of 1863; Ilia’s next and enduring paper, Iveria, began only in 1877 (Rayfield, 2010; Suny, 1994). This collection treats Sakartvelos Moambe as a journal of 1863 that lasted about a year.] Brief as it was, it mattered out of all proportion to its life: it was the first sustained platform of the tergdaleulebi, the proving-ground of the new literary language, and the announcement that a modern Georgian public culture had begun.

The Years Between

Between the folding of Sakartvelos Moambe and the founding of Iveria lay more than a decade in which Ilia was far from idle. He held official posts in the imperial administration of the Caucasus — for a period he served as a magistrate and in the judicial and local-government institutions opened by the Great Reforms, work that took him deep into the actual condition of the Georgian peasantry and the countryside (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). He continued to write, producing in these years some of his most important prose and poetry (see The Poetry and Prose). And he began to conceive the larger institutional program — the bank, the literacy society, the revived press — that would occupy the second half of his life (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5).

Iveria (from 1877)

In 1877 Ilia launched Iveria — the name is the classical and poetic name for Georgia (Iberia) — which would become the great organ of the Georgian national movement (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on Iveria from 1877). Beginning as a periodical and developing into a daily newspaper — it ran as a daily from the mid-1880s until 1906 — Iveria was for nearly thirty years the principal forum of Georgian public life under Ilia’s editorship (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, giving Ilia’s editorship of Iveria to 1905/1906). Through it Ilia shaped Georgian opinion on every question that mattered to the awakening: the defense and cultivation of the language, the founding of schools, the protection of Georgian land, the memory of the nation’s history, and — with growing insistence in his later years — the restoration of the Georgian Church’s autocephaly (see The Defense of Autocephaly).

Iveria was also a nursery of Georgian letters. It published the leading writers of two generations, printed poetry and fiction and criticism, and served as the training-ground for younger Georgian writers and journalists — including, in a famous and much-cited episode, the earliest published verse of the seminary student Ioseb Jughashvili, the future Stalin, several of whose Georgian poems appeared in Iveria in 1895–96 under Ilia’s editorship (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; Montefiore, Young Stalin, 2007, on Stalin’s poems in Iveria). That the paper of the man later venerated as St. Ilia the Righteous should have first printed the juvenile verse of the man who would become the Soviet dictator — and who would later be linked by some to Ilia’s assassination — is one of the grim ironies of the story (see Who and Why: The Live Dispute).

The Press as a National Institution

The importance of the journals lies in what they built. Through Sakartvelos Moambe and, above all, Iveria, Ilia created something Georgia had not had: a continuous, modern, national public sphere in the Georgian language, in which a scattered and stateless people could think of itself as one and debate its future (Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, on the making of a Georgian public; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5). The press was the first of the institutions with which Ilia substituted for the lost apparatus of a Georgian state — and the platform from which he launched the others, the literacy society and the bank (see The Society for Literacy and the Bank). For thirty years, to read Georgian public opinion was very largely to read Ilia Chavchavadze.

See Also

References

  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The absence and creation of a Georgian public; Sakartvelos Moambe 1863; Iveria from 1877; Ilia’s administrative service; the press and the national movement.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (The brief life of Sakartvelos Moambe; Iveria as journal and daily; Iveria as a nursery of writers; Stalin’s poems.)
  • Manning, Paul. Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. (The journals and the making of a Georgian public sphere.)
  • Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Young Stalin. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007. (Stalin’s early Georgian verse published in Iveria under Ilia’s editorship, 1895–96.)
  • Ilia Chavchavadze. Wikipedia. (Founding of Sakartvelos Moambe 1863 and Iveria 1877; Ilia’s editorship of Iveria to 1905/1906 — used to locate dates, cross-checked against Rayfield and Suny.)