The Poetry and Prose

Ilia Chavchavadze’s literary corpus — the manifesto-travelogue Letters of a Traveler, the ascetic narrative poem The Hermit, the peasant novellas Otar’s Widow and Is That a Man?!, the satire Happy Nation, and the lyric poetry — through which he refounded modern Georgian literature and gave a stateless nation back its self-knowledge.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Refounder of Georgian Literature

Ilia Chavchavadze is to modern Georgian literature roughly what Pushkin is to Russian or Shevchenko to Ukrainian: not the first to write in the language, but the man who reforged it into a living modern instrument and gave it a new dignity and reach (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 2010, on Ilia’s centrality; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5). His achievement was double. In the practical war over the language he led the party of reform, purging the literary Georgian of dead archaisms and Russianisms and forging a clear modern standard close to living speech — a controversy that set the tergdaleulebi against the older literary establishment (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the language-reform battle). And in his own writings he gave that reformed language a body of poetry and prose that his people read as the mirror of themselves. His works were mostly published first in his journals and in the collections of the movement, and gathered in the editions that made him a classic; the English-reading world knows them chiefly through the translations of Marjory and Oliver Wardrop (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; The Hermit, trans. Marjory Wardrop, London, 1895).

Letters of a Traveler

The single most important of Ilia’s prose works, and the manifesto of his whole generation, is Letters of a Traveler (Mgzavris tserilebi), written in the early 1860s and published in the following years — the record, part travelogue and part meditation, of his own journey home from Russia across the Terek and the Georgian Military Highway into Georgia (Manning, “Describing Dialect and Defining Civilization… Ilia Chavchavadze’s ‘Letters of a Traveler’”; Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). The tergdaleulebi — “those who drank of the Terek” — took their very name from that crossing, and Ilia’s Letters made the journey into a parable: the young Georgian returning from the empire, looking with newly critical eyes at his own country’s backwardness and beauty, and awakening to the duty of national renewal. In its most famous passage the traveler, crossing the Terek, meets the river as a symbol of vital, headlong life and reflects on the sleep of his own nation (Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, reading the Terek passage). Letters of a Traveler is, as scholars have argued, at once a nationalist manifesto and a subtle literary meditation on language, civilization, and self-knowledge — perhaps the single most important political writing of the Georgian 1860s (Manning, “Describing Dialect and Defining Civilization”).

The Hermit

The most explicitly religious of Ilia’s major works is the narrative poem The Hermit (Gandegili), published in 1883 — the work in this corpus that bears most directly on the Church and on the ascetic tradition of Georgian Christianity (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on Gandegili; The Hermit, trans. Marjory Wardrop, London, 1895). The poem is set in the high Caucasus, at the ancient cave-hermitage near Mount Mqinvari (Kazbek) — the Betlemi (Bethlehem) cave of Georgian tradition — where a monk has lived for decades in perfect ascetic solitude, having renounced the world for God. Into his frozen paradise comes a young shepherdess, seeking shelter from a storm; and in a single night the hermit, who had thought himself proof against the world, is shaken to his foundations by the stirring of desire and human longing, and — in the tradition’s reading of the poem — falls, or is broken, dying in the recognition of his frailty (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the plot and themes of Gandegili; Wardrop translation, 1895).

The Hermit is a work of genuine ambiguity, and the collection resists flattening it. It can be read as a meditation on the tragedy of a sanctity that has fled the world rather than redeemed it, on the ineradicable claims of human nature, and on the loneliness of the ascetic ideal; it is not a simple hymn to monasticism, and some read it as questioning the eremitic flight from life (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). Yet it is a poem soaked in the imagery and reverence of the Georgian Christian ascetic tradition — the cave-hermitages, the fasting, the prayer, the holy mountain — and its very seriousness about the ascetic vocation is itself a form of engagement with the faith (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; see Personal Faith and the Thin Record). That Ilia, the secular reformer, chose the figure of a Caucasian hermit for one of his greatest poems is a fact the collection notes and does not over-read: it attests his deep formation in the Christian imagination of Georgia, without settling the question of his personal devotion.

The Peasant Novellas

Two prose fictions carry Ilia’s social conscience and his art of the Georgian countryside. Otar’s Widow (Otaraant kvrivi), published in the 1880s, is a short novel of the Kakhetian village — the tragedy of a proud peasant widow and her son and the gulf between peasant and noble in the aftermath of emancipation — widely reckoned Ilia’s finest work of prose fiction and a landmark of Georgian realism (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on Otaraant kvrivi). Is That a Man?! (Katsia-adamiani?!), written and revised across the 1860s, is by contrast a savage satire — the portrait of the useless, gluttonous, idle Georgian provincial nobleman Luarsab Tatqaridze, a merciless comic indictment of the parasitic gentry whose worthlessness Ilia held partly responsible for the nation’s plight (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on Katsia-adamiani?!). Together the two novellas show the double edge of Ilia’s social vision: compassion for the exploited peasant and contempt for the idle noble — a critique of his own class in the name of the nation.

Satire, Lyric, and the Range of the Corpus

Ilia’s satirical vein extended into shorter works such as Happy Nation (Bednieri eri), a bitter ironic sketch mocking a complacent, self-satisfied people asleep to its own decline — the title’s “happiness” being the false contentment of a nation that does not know its danger (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the satires). Against the satire stands the lyric poetry, in which Ilia is at his most enduringly loved: patriotic and meditative verse — “Bazaleti Lake,” “To the Kvareli Mountains,” “The Ghost” (Achrdili), the elegiac and prayerful poems — in which the themes of homeland, memory, faith, and the longing for national resurrection are given their purest voice (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; anthologies of Georgian poetry in the Wardrop and later translations). Among these later devotional and reflective poems is the one Church tradition connects with his own spirit of forgiveness — a “Prayer” echoing the words of Christ from the Cross, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do” (Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907), orthochristian.com, attributing such a “Prayer” to Ilia; the attribution is treated under Personal Faith and the Thin Record).

What the Corpus Did

The literary achievement is inseparable from the national one. Ilia’s writings gave a stateless, dispersed people a shared body of images and words in which to recognize itself: the returning traveler, the proud widow, the idle noble, the sleeping nation, the hermit on the holy mountain (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019, on the literature as national self-constitution). This is why his death was mourned as a national catastrophe and why his memory could later carry both a secular national cult and, eventually, a religious veneration: he had, quite literally, given his people the language in which they thought of themselves (see Saint and Symbol). The ideas carried in this literature — the vision of the nation, and the triad of Fatherland, Language, and Faith — are treated in the companion file (see The Ideas and the Triad).

References

Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Ilia as refounder of Georgian literature; the language-reform battle; Letters of a Traveler; The Hermit/Gandegili; Otar’s Widow; Is That a Man?!; the satires and lyric poetry.)
Manning, Paul. Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012; and Manning, “Describing Dialect and Defining Civilization in an Early Georgian Nationalist Manifesto: Ilia Ch’avch’avadze’s ‘Letters of a Traveler’.” (Letters of a Traveler as manifesto; the Terek passage; language and civilization.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The literature and the national movement.)
Chavchavadze, Ilia. The Hermit (Gandegili). Trans. Marjory Wardrop. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1895. (The narrative poem in English.)
Tsipuria, Bela. “Ilia Chavchavadze.” In Great Immortality, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason. Leiden: Brill, 2019. (The literature as national self-constitution.)
Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907), orthochristian.com / pravoslavie.ru. (The attribution of a “Prayer” echoing Luke 23:34; treated critically.)