A Postmodernist Reflection on the History of Old Georgian Literature in Rostom Chkheidze's Beletristical essay "A Glimpse at Georgian Literature"

Abstract

Georgian literature – whether in its general panorama or in particular aspects – along with the history of the Georgian nation, represents a highly inte­r­esting, unique, and self-sufficient space within the world’s artistic thought, one of the primary characteristics of the nation, and has repeatedly become the focus of interest for Georgian (and not only Georgian) scholars. It is enough to recall the na­mes of Marjory and Oliver Wardrop, Marie Brosset, Arthur Leist, David Lang, Donald Ray­f­ield, Luigi Magarotto, Alexei Losev… as evidence of how many authoritative foreign thinkers have delved deeply into this field, not to mention the contributions of Georgian scholars themselves (Vachtang Kotetishvili, Korneli Kekelidze, Pavle Ingorokva, Geronti Kikodze, Archil Jorjadze, Revaz Siradze, Grigol Kiknadze, Akaki Gatserelia, Guram Asatiani, Tamaz Chkhenkeli, Zurab Kiknadze, and others), as well as the work of distinguished generations of researchers from    Tbilisi State University and the Institute of Literature.

        The paper discusses the postmodernist interpretation of the history of Georgian literature – Rostom Chkheidze’s version concerning the main trajectory of the de­ve­lopment of national literature.

       The postmodernist’s concept is grounded in Pavle Ingorokva’s idea that even in a God-forgetting state, there existed a group of people who were conscious of the “sa­credness and divinely intended purpose” of literature. Pavle Ingorokva had already distinguished between chronological time and supra-temporality, just as Western mo­de­rnist literature separated external and internal time. He did not object to the idea of freeing literature from rigid historical-chronological frames, and although he could not realize it, he harbored the inner desire to someday write the history of Georgian literature in a way that would correlate not so much with historical chronology, but with the mysterious laws that could assign a completely different place to a given ar­tistic work within the background of spirituality, in the context of supra-te­m­po­rality.

       It is precisely with these “mysterious laws” in mind that Rostom Chkheidze co­n­structs his text, conscientiously acknowledging at every “break” (a term coined by the author) those worthy scholars whose ideas connected a society isolated from world culture by the “Iron Curtain” (not only the Georgian one) with global literary processes.