The Society for Literacy and the Bank

The two great practical institutions of Ilia’s national work: the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians, founded in 1879 to build Georgian schools and print Georgian books, and the Nobility Land Bank, which he led and used as the financial engine of the whole movement — keeping Georgian land in Georgian hands and funding culture from its profits. And, at the end, his election in 1906 to the imperial State Council.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians (1879)

If the journals gave the nation a public, the schools were to give it a future. In 1879 Ilia was among the founders — and became the long-serving head — of the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians (Kartvelta shoris tsera-kitkhvis gamavrtselebeli sazogadoeba), the central educational institution of the Georgian national movement (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, National Archives of Georgia; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on the 1879 founding). Its purpose was exactly what its name declared: to spread literacy in the Georgian language among a people whose schooling, where it existed at all, was increasingly conducted in Russian. The Society opened and funded Georgian-language schools, prepared and printed textbooks and cheap editions of Georgian books, supported libraries and reading rooms, and gave stipends to poor students (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, National Archives of Georgia).

The Society answered the deepest layer of the russification threat. Under the exarchate and the imperial administration the Georgian language had been pressed out of seminary and school (see Russification and the Georgian Predicament); a people whose children learned to read only in Russian would, within a generation or two, cease to be a reading nation in its own tongue. The Society was the organized counter-force — a voluntary institution, funded by Georgians, teaching Georgians to read Georgian — and it became, alongside Iveria, the most important national institution of the age, with branches across the country and a membership that made it a school of civic life as much as of letters (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5). Ilia’s decades of leadership of the Society are among the most concrete of his services, and among those the Church would later name in numbering him with the saints (see The Act and the Rationale; OrthodoxWiki, Ilia the Righteous, on his educational work).

The Society also gave institutional form to Ilia’s care for the Georgian manuscript heritage — the ancient books, Gospels, and hagiographies in which the Christian civilization of Georgia was recorded. The gathering and preservation of Georgian manuscripts, which the Society and its allied institutions promoted, was of a piece with the whole program: to keep a Christian people’s memory from being lost (OrthodoxWiki, Ilia the Righteous, on the collection of manuscripts; Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907), orthochristian.com, on establishing depositories for Georgian manuscripts).

The Nobility Land Bank

Ilia understood, as few cultural nationalists do, that a nation’s culture rests on its economic base — above all, for an agrarian people, on the land. Through the second half of the nineteenth century the Georgian nobility, impoverished by the emancipation of the serfs and by its own improvidence, was selling its estates, often to Armenian and Russian buyers; a Georgia in which the land itself passed out of Georgian hands would lose its material footing (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5, on the crisis of the Georgian nobility and the sale of land; Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors, 2005, on the economic decline of the nobility). Ilia’s answer was a Nobility Land Bank at Tbilisi — the Bank of the Georgian Nobility — which he was instrumental in founding and which he led for decades as its director and chairman (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on the Bank of the Nobility). [Disputed: sources give slightly different dates and titles for Ilia’s leadership of the bank; the firm points are that he was a founder and long-serving head of the Nobility Land Bank in Tbilisi from the mid-1870s and that he left this position when elected to the State Council in 1906 (Suny, 1994; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia). Exact founding-year and title are treated as approximate.]

The bank did two things at once. It provided Georgian landowners with credit on terms that let them keep their estates rather than sell to outside buyers, slowing the alienation of Georgian land; and — this was Ilia’s stroke of genius — it channeled a large part of its profits into the national cause, funding the Society for Literacy, schools, publications, theaters, and cultural institutions (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5). The bank was thus the financial engine of the whole movement: a modern financial institution turned to national-cultural ends, the material base beneath the journals and the schools. That the leading writer of the nation was also, for thirty years, a working bank director is one of the distinctive facts of Ilia’s life, and a measure of how completely he fused the cultural and the practical (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 2010).

Public Leadership and the State Council (1906)

For four decades Ilia was, in effect, the presiding public man of Georgia — editor, banker, society-chairman, the acknowledged national authority, addressed and remembered as the “father” of the nation (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019). The revolution of 1905, which shook the whole empire, brought this public standing into the arena of imperial politics. In 1906, in the aftermath of the revolution and the creation of new representative institutions, Ilia was elected a representative of the Georgian nobility to the reformed State Council of the Russian Empire — the upper chamber of the new imperial legislature — and moved to St. Petersburg to take his seat (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on the 1906 election to the State Council).

In the State Council Ilia held to the moderate, liberal-national line of his whole life. He is recorded as declaring that although elected by the nobility he would represent the whole Georgian nation, not one class; he spoke against capital punishment — a stand of particular note given his own violent death the next year — and he pressed the causes of Georgian autonomy and of the restoration of the Georgian Church’s autocephaly (Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, and the Georgian biographical tradition, on his positions in the State Council; on autocephaly, see The Defense of Autocephaly). This was the culmination of his public career — and also, in the fevered revolutionary politics of 1905–07, part of what made him a target. His moderation and his open hostility to the revolutionary maximalism of the Georgian social democrats set him against the rising force of the age, and the following year, on the road home to Georgia, he was killed (see Tsitsamuri 1907).

The Sum of the Work

Taken together — the journals, the Society for Literacy, the bank, the public leadership — Ilia’s institutions amount to something remarkable: the deliberate construction, by one man and his generation, of the working parts of a modern nation in the absence of a state. Where a nation would normally have a government, Ilia built voluntary institutions; where it would have public schools, he built a society; where it would have a national bank, he turned a nobles’ credit bank to national ends; where it would have a parliament, he made a press. This is why “father of the nation” is not mere honorific: in a quite literal, institutional sense, Ilia fathered the framework within which modern Georgia would take shape (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; see Father of the Nation).

References

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The Society for Literacy 1879; the crisis of the nobility and the sale of land; the Nobility Land Bank and its funding of the national cause; the 1906 State Council; Ilia’s public leadership.)
Jones, Stephen F. Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883–1917. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. (The economic decline of the Georgian nobility; the revolutionary politics of 1905–07.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Ilia as writer and bank director.)
Tsipuria, Bela. “Ilia Chavchavadze.” In Great Immortality, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason. Leiden: Brill, 2019. (Ilia as “father of the nation”; the institutional construction of the national movement.)
Ilia Chavchavadze. National Archives of Georgia (archive.gov.ge). (The Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians, 1879.)
Ilia Chavchavadze. Wikipedia. (The Society 1879; the Bank of the Nobility; the 1906 election to the State Council; his positions there — used to locate dates, cross-checked against Suny.)
OrthodoxWiki, Ilia the Righteous; Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907), orthochristian.com. (His educational work and the preservation of Georgian manuscripts, in the Church’s account.)