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Strangers in a Strange Land —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND — 1 — —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century Editorial Board: Anthony Anemone (The New School) Robert Bird (The University of Chicago) Eliot Borenstein (New York University) Angela Brintlinger (The Ohio State University) Karen Evans-Romaine (Ohio University) Jochen Hellbeck (Rutgers University) Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Christina Kiaer (Northwestern University) Alaina Lemon (University of Michigan) Simon Morrison (Princeton University) Eric Naiman (University of California, Berkeley) Joan Neuberger (University of Texas, Austin) Ludmila Parts (McGill University) Ethan Pollock (Brown University) Cathy Popkin (Columbia University) Stephanie Sandler (Harvard University) Boris Wolfson (Amherst College), Series Editor — 2 — —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries Paul MANNING Boston 2012 — 3 — —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-936235-76-6 Book design by Adell Medovoy On the cover: Photo by Vasil Roinashvili (1879–1958). 1912. Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com — 4 — Effective December 12th, 2017, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative, which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— Figure 1: Photo by Vasil Roinashvili (1879–1958). 1912. Georgian Dream Come True (1912). Mixed media, photography, and painting. Self-portrait of photographer Vasil Roinashvili, represented lying in heaven while reading a newspaper among the attributes of a Georgian supra, drinking horns, games and musical instruments; in the background is a view of Mount Kazbek from the post station at Kazbek (image courtesy of Giorgi Gersamia). — 5 — —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— Contents Acknowledgments 8 Introduction: Europe Started Here 10 I: Languages of Nature, Culture, and Civilization: Letters of a Traveler 28 II: Imperial and Colonial Sublime: The Aesthetics of Infrastructures 59 III: Correspondence: “Georgians, that is, readers of Droeba” 81 IV: Spies and Journalists: Aristocratic and Intelligentsia Publics 111 V: Writers and Speakers: Pseudonymous Intelligentsia and Anonymous People 155 VI: Dialogic Genres: Conversations and Feuilletons 183 VII: Writing and Life: Fact and Fairy Tale 219 VIII: Fellow Travelers: Localism, Occidentalism, and Orientalism 251 Conclusion: A Stranger from a Strange Land 286 Endnotes 298 References 318 Index 334 — 6 — —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— List of Illustrations Figure 1: Georgian Dream Come True, by Vasil Roinashvili (1912). Mixed media, photography, and painting 5 Figure 2: View at Kazbek from the post station 28 Figure 3: Stages of Two Literary Crossings of the Dariel Pass 40 Figure 4: Picturesque Technology and Sublime Nature on the Dariel Pass 80 Figure 5: Front page of Droeba, July 20, 1879 85 Figure 6: Page from a manuscript of a textbook for teaching Georgian to Ottoman Georgians 290 Figure 7: Pages from a handwritten grammar notebook 294 Maps Map 1: Regions of Georgia 16 Map 2: Rivers and cities mentioned in the text 223 — 7 — —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— Acknowledgments I would like to thank Ronald Suny for inspiring me to undertake this project and for encouraging me to complete it. Funds provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), under authority of a Title VIII grant from the U.S. Department of State, as well an NEH/ACTR fellowship, supported the work leading to this report in whole or in part. Neither NCEEER, the NEH or ACTR, nor the U.S. Government is responsible for the views expressed within this text. I also would to acknowledge the helpful advice and enthusiasm of the late Robert Huber, president of NCEEER, during the period of research- ing and writing this monograph. This book took form over the period of more than a decade, and there are many people to thank. My research work in Georgia would not have been as productive as it was without the ongoing friendship, advice, and assistance of Paata Bukhrashvili and, in his name, his friends and fam- ily. I thank my research assistant, David Toklikishvili, for his uncanny abilities to do in a day what might have taken me weeks to do on my own. I thank Zaza Shatirishvili for his insightful comments helping me to frame this book, and I also thank him and his family and friendship “circle” not only for their hospitality, but also for helping me understand ethnographically what the term “intelligentsia” means in its best sense. I thank Tina Tseradze in particular for helping me do the crucial research that allowed me to complete this book. Many of the chapters have benefited from the insightful comments of many people over a long time. In addition to those people mentioned above, I thank Kristof van Assche, Susan Gal, Victor Friedman, Erin Koch, Florian Muhlfried, Erin Pappas, Alejandro Paz, Stephanie Platz, Oliver Reisner, Hulya Sakarya, Michael Silverstein, Rupert Stasch, and Kevin Tuite, for listening, reading, and discussing parts of this book as a work in progress. I thank Hulya Sakarya for introducing me to the work of Roinashvili, in particular the image that graces the cover of this book. I thank Alaina Lemon for her general insights and particularly for encouraging me to not give up on this book. I thank Anne Meneley for her careful, critical, even caustic, comments on the work in progress — 8 — —————————————————— Acknowledgments —————————————————— and and for helping me “re-Orient” the framework and argument in a less Eurocentric direction. I thank Shunsuke Nozawa for inspiring me, in both his written work (2011, 2012) and in conversations, to rewrite this book to make “nobody” the hero of the story, as well as helping me understand the importance of nobodies and to see how many different ways there are of being nobody. I give particular thanks to Bruce Grant, Michael Dylan Foster, Mi- yako Inoue, Stephen Jones, Brian Larkin, and especially Harsha Ram for encouragement and careful and insightful readings of the final draft. Lastly, I thank my editors, Sharona Vedol and Boris Wolfson, for their enthusiasm and advice, and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments. Some of the material in Chapter 1 originally appeared in a different form in “Describing dialect and defining civilization in an early Geor- gian nationalist manifesto: Ilia Ch’avch’avadze’s ‘Letters of a Traveler’.” Russian Review 63 (1) (2004), 26-47. This book, which begins with travelers writing about the mountains of the Caucasus and ends with travelers who never go very far from home, is haunted by the absent presence of my late father, Harvey H. Manning, a wilderness writer and conservationist who first taught me how to appreciate the alpine sublime of the Cascades and whose travels over hill and dale, like those of Bavreli, never took him very far from home. I dedicate this book to him and the fellow travelers who shared the trails with him; my mother, Betty L. Manning; my sisters, Claudia, Penelope, and Rebecca; my nephew, Dylan; and one faithful hiking dog among many, Buffalo. This book about nobodies is further dedicated to nobodies every- where, and is inspired by those who act today in their non-name, in particular the Anonymous collectivity. — 9 — —————————————————— INTRODUCTION —————————————————— Introduction: Europe Started Here “Europe started here.” The current slogan decorating the Web site of the Georgian Department of Tourism proposes a seemingly radical revision- ist answer to the question that has haunted the Georgian intelligentsia since the nineteenth century: “Europe or Asia?” (Orjonikidze 1997).1 While Georgians have long seen their modern predicament in terms of their ambiguous location within an Orientalist imaginative geography, few members of the intelligentsia have ever seriously proposed any an- swer to that question other than “Europe.” But this answer just raises further questions. In fact, the whole defi- nition of that peculiar social formation, the intelligentsia (a collective noun in Russian, the singular form of which is intelligent, plural intel- ligenty), appears to be found in mediating the gap between “Europe” and “here,” wherever “here” is. For each generation,
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