Literary Model of Realism in Georgian Literature

Irma Ratiani Literary Model of Realism in Georgian Literature Baratashvili’s idea acquires additional meaning from the 1860s when the real goal of the political course and social strategies of new colonists become obvious - to transform Georgia into a peripheral zone of socio-political and cultural developments (which corresponds to the classical interpretation of the concept of “colony”). The reaction of the Georgian public to Russian colonialism also changes and the ambivalent status of the Romanticism period is replaced by radical opposition: the religious strategy of anti-colonial movement, developed historically, was replaced by the national strategy. It is not accidental that Ilia Chavchavadze, leader of Georgian realism, clung to the figure of Nikoloz Baratashvili - he was follower of Baratashvili with respect to the Russian colonial policy, and he was not alone in this: reconstruction of the national values underlie the work of other Georgian realist writers and publicists as well1. The above-mentioned particular tendency does not rule out the close relation of Georgian realism with the Western model of realism. In its turn, the Western model of realism represented reaction to subjectivism characteristic of Romanticism: “Romanticism retained certain illusions and introduced the sense of imperfection of new life. “Critical realism” was a sober analysis of the “lost illusions”, which was aware that the “divine comedy” of the world was gradually acquiring the everyday characteristics and was evolving into “human comedy” (Borev 2001: 390). This was the world of the “dead souls”, “walking dead”, “humiliated and insulted”, “poor people”, as well as the world of the Goriots, Chichikovs, Oblomovs, narrated in the slow, careful and attentive manner. Writers were exploring the problem – “Human being and the world”, which from the present-day viewpoint can be renamed as “me and the world” and can be defined as the most critical position in the history of the world literature2. The leading literary genres of realism - novel, short story, poem, etc. – make successful use of satire and humor, grotesque and irony in order to express better the position of the literature: according to realism, the ideal can be discovered only by means of criticizing and rejecting the existing! Hence, writers are desperately trying to reach the ideal, to this end, they have to enter life to a greater extent, where people are constantly struggling with the history. After all, the cultural mission of realism is the search for man’s historical purpose and humanity (Borev 2001: 388)! Realism works in a politically intensive, socially differentiated and culturally disintegrated period, which becomes increasingly more engaged in scientific and technical progress. A clash of values of all types and complexity are markers of realism. The field of writers’ sight incudes life 1 The present work does not deal with the discussion of the 19th-c. Georgian social and political journalism, but only literary processes. 2 Naturally it should be borne in mind that Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais is regarded as the first text written in the realistic manner. It is very early to speak about the literary trend of realism in the period of Rabelais – it becomes established only in the 19th c., but realism, as a method, found full reflection in the work by this great early Renaissance author. 1 with all its details and problems; realists look at life with their eyes wide open, at every step they feel regret caused by unachieved justice, insurmountable mercantilism, and unheard pain. Georgian realists, “Tergdaleulebi”3, are well aware of the literary canon of world realism (both by means of original and translated texts) and the texts of its main representatives - Gogol, Zola, Balzac, Dickens, Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and others; they adapt the basic realistic themes, such as complicated relations between the person and the society, details of everyday social life, psychological dilemmas, etc. The present, rejected and leveled by Romantics, is gradually regaining positions, the poet/writer descends headlong to the “sinful earth” and assumes reality as a shield. This fundamental characteristic of realism, supported by the common aesthetic and poetical principles, appears as the reason of interaction of realistic schools, including Georgian. Realist writers - Georgian, French, British, Russian, German, etc. - often deal with the same concepts, as if in collusion they disrupt the genre and narrative strategies established by Romanticists. Realistic novel and short story occupy the literary domain, whereas of the poetic genres poem is preferred. The literary process becomes extremely transparent and, in addition, controllable: the author’s figure moves out of the romantic shroud into the text – the more the role of the writer’s biography is reduced in his work, the more the role of his work increases in his biography. An author of the realism period is no longer a person emotionally burning outside/inside the text, but is a significant part of the text proper, who masterfully uses literature as a platform for voicing urgent social, national, ethnic and worldview problems: involvement of external factors in the literary process lends them special purposefulness: authors listen carefully to the voices of the epoch (Bakhtin), Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, Aleksandre Qazbegi, Vazha-Pshavela – are the authors listening to their period: their works can be referred to by the metaphor Intelligent Sensitivity, rather than Sensitive Intelligence. Realists do not confine to their own opinion, but are interested in the views of others concerning their opinion: reader is no longer an external listener but an intellectual partner in the enormous realistic dialogue, called Life. Literature enters the phase of oratorical pragmatics. Romantic introversion is gradually transformed into realistic extraversion, whereas politicization and socialization of literature reveals national differences to a greater extent: Georgian realism is loaded with “Georgian problems”, which from the second half of the 19th c. are inevitably linked with the search for the national identity as a purpose. Struggle for the political independence of the country is the most crucial local problem which is tackled with firm insistence by Georgian literature of the period of classical realism andwhich from this standpoint creates a quite specific wing of the world realism. “For critical realism, formed In West European countries (Dickens, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert), the major problem is the impossibility to achieve human happiness and independence in the society, based on the primacy of money. In such a society achievement of happiness is linked with gaining the wealth, which is impossible, or is spiritually destroying for a noble person of high moral principles and ideals…The main task of a person is to find an alternative: he should seek happiness beyond wealth or should become rich in an honest way. The utopianism of such an alternative proper becomes an instrument of sharp criticism of bourgeois society, which puts a person in such an unstable and unpromising condition” (Borev 2001: 399). Unlike the Western wing of realism, Russian critical realism (Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov) works on the problem of conflict between person and the world: within this concept the controversies between the person and the 3 Almost all distinguished representatives of this group received education at St.-Petersburg University, which, from the purely geographical viewpoint implied crossing River Terek on the Military Road, leading from Georgia to the North (Tergdaleuli – literally, one who drank water of Terek (Tergi - in Georgian). 2 world are manifested fully, however, the way to eradicate evil is not violence, which is historically dangerous and unjustifiable, but an attempt to ennoble it: Russian realism does not see any way other than self-perfection of a person and reacting to evil with forgiveness. Georgian realism adopts freely both Western and Russian experience (Solomon Isakich Mejghanuashvili by L. Ardaziani, The Family Settlement by G. Eristavi, On the Gallows by I. Chavchavadze), but identifies as its main message another problem: varied possibilities of realistic manner of reflection in settlement of the issue of the national identity! The idea of national independence is the main idea of Georgian critical realism which covers and overshadows the acute social-political problems. Due to the activation of the idea of national independence Georgian critical realism occupies a special place in the common European area of realistic literature. In this regard, the texts such as Letters of a Traveller by Ilia Chavchavadze, Tornike Eristavi by Akaki Tsereteli, Elguja by Aleksandre Qazbegi, etc. acquire landmark importance. It is noteworthy that the idea of national independence in the depth of Georgian critical realism is directly linked with the revival of the historical value of the concept Caucasian, which, as noted above, underwent considerable devaluation in the ambivalent period of Romanticism. If Georgia separates itself from the other Caucasian regions, it will find itself in isolation, face-to-face with the “Russian bear” which especially intensifies its imperialistic plans in Georgia and the Caucasus from the 1860s. Against this background, the poem Shamil’s Dream (1859) by Akaki Tsereteli sounds like

Load more