1. Even research on national Soviet and post-Soviet works of literature rarely addresses issues of national form specifically. See Lahusen, Thomas and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, specifically an article by Castillo, Greg, “Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and National Question,” 91–115; Smola, Klavdia and Uffelmann, Dirk, eds., Postcolonial Slavic Literatures after Communism (Frankfurt am Main, 2016)Google Scholar; Smola, Klavdia and Uffelmann, Dirk, eds., “Postkolonial΄nost΄ postsovetskikh literatur: Konstruktsii etnicheskogo,” Special Cluster in Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, no. 144 (2017): 420–508Google Scholar; Dobrenko, Evgeny and Jonsson-Skradol, Natalia, eds., Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses (London, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For books and articles specifically devoted to the question of national form, see Zelinskii, Kornelii, “Natsional΄naia forma i sotsialisticheskii realizm,” Voprosy literatury no. 3, 1957: 3–34Google Scholar; Jeffery Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington, 2000); Thomas Lahusen, “Socialist in Form, National in Content? Nikolai Chekmenev’s Seven Rivers and Tölgön Kasymbekov’s Broken Sword” (Manuscript quoted with kind permission of the author), unpublished paper.

2. I.K. Lupol, M.M. Rozental΄ and S. M. Tret΄iakov, eds., Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s΄΄ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), 15. In reference to Tatar literature, K. G. Nadzhmi equated the study of classic authors primarily to the study of “representatives of Russian classical and modern literature.” Ibid., 71.

3. The initial imbalance between the postulated equality and the de facto inequality between the center and the periphery was constantly shifting, favoring the center, the only real holder of political power.

4. For a reading of multinational Soviet literature as one of the models of world literature, see Susanne Frank, “‘Multinational Soviet Literature’: The Project and Its Post-Soviet Legacy in Iurii Rytkheu and Gennadii Aigi,” in Uffelmann and Smola, eds., Postcolonial Slavic Literatures after Communism, 191–219; Susanne Frank, “Proekt mnogonatsional΄noi sovetskoi literatury kak normativnyi proekt mirovoi literatury (s imperskimi implikatsiiami),” Imagologiia i komparativistika/Imagology and Comparative Studies, no. 11 (2019): 230–47.

5. Sharp, Jane Ashton, Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal΄ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Kunichika, Michael, “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Boston, 2015)Google Scholar; Shevelenko, Irina, Modernizm kak arkhaizm: Natsionalizm i poiski modernistskoi estetiki v Rossii (Moscow, 2017)Google Scholar.

6. Ram, Harsha, “Decadent Nationalism, ‘Peripheral’ Modernism: The Georgian Literary Manifesto between Symbolism and the Avant-garde,” Modernism/modernity 21, no. 1 (January 2014): 343–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 355. See also Ram, Harsha, “Towards a Cross-Cultural Poetics of the Contact Zone: Romantic, Modernist, and Soviet Intertextualities in Boris Pasternak’s Translations of T΄itsian T΄abidze,” Comparative Literature 59, no.1 (Winter 2007): 63–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ram, Harsha, “Andrej Belyj and Georgia: Georgian Modernism and the ‘Peripheral’ Reception of the Petersburg Text,” Russian Literature 58, no. 1 (July 2005): 243–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Ram, “Decadent Nationalism,” 355.

8. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures in World Literature” and “More Conjectures” in Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London, 2013), 43–62 and 107–20.

9. Franco Moretti, “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur” in Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London, 2013), 133.

10. Ibid. For Moretti himself, the contradictions associated with the linking of the two theoretical models that he used, the model of literary evolution coming from the Russian formalists, in particular from Iurii Tynianov, and the model of the theory of world-systems by Immanuel Wallerstein, were clear. Moretti tried to resolve them by temporarily differentiating the models of world literature before and after the eighteenth century. However, as the example of socialist realism demonstrates, the model of literary subordination of the periphery, which denies it formative power, is problematic.

11. Viktor B. Shklovskiĭ, Rozanov: Iz knigi “Siuzhet kak fenomen stilia” (Petrograd, 1921); Viktor B. Shklovskii, Mater΄ial i stil΄ v romane L΄va Tolstogo “Voina i mir” (Moscow, 1928); Iurii Lotman, “Siuzhetnoe prostranstvo russkogo romana XIX stoletiia,” in his Izbrannye stat΄i v trekh tomakh, vol. 3, (Tallinn, 1993), 91.

12. For lack of a better term, I will refer to the external form as linguistic and the internal form as the extralinguistic elements of literary form. I will reserve a more detailed definition for a later article. By plot I mean the order that gives meaning and integrity to the space-time continuum of the fictional world, the actions that occur in it, and the characters performing these actions. See Zaal Andronikashvili, Die Erzeugung des dramatischen Textes: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Sujets (Berlin, 2008). By metaplot, I mean variations of the same plot (for example, the metaplot of the “prisoner of the Caucasus”).

13. When considering the literature of Georgian socialist realism, we should take into account the complex, at least three-stage relationship between Georgian literary tradition, socialist realism, and the “world” literary context (including the Persian literary tradition, European and Russian literature, and, since the 1960s, the broader context).

14. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 10.

15. For Georgian modernism see Harsha Ram, “Modernism on the Periphery: Literary Life in Postrevolutionary Tbilisi,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 367–82; Dmitry Tumanishvili, Luigi Magarotto, Maia Tsitsishvili, and Nino Chogoshvili, Georgian Modernism 1910–1930 (Tbilisi, 2007); Harsha Ram, “Introducing Georgian Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 21, no. 1 (January 2014): 283–88; Harsha Ram, “Decadent Nationalism, ‘Peripheral’ Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 21, no. 1 (January 2014): 343–59; Konstantine Bregaże, “K΄artuli modernizmi rogorc‘ okc‘identoc‘entrizmi” in Bregaże, Moderni da modernizmi (Tbilisi, 2018), 134–57.

16. “Doklad M. G. Toroshelidze o literature Gruzinskoi SSR,” in Pervyii vsesoiuznyii s΄΄ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: Stenograficheskii otchet, 74–103.

17. Pervyii vsesoiuznyii s΄΄ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 74.

18. Ibid.

19. Torošeliże, a professional revolutionary, studied at the same Tiflis Theological Seminary as Stalin. He belonged to the Bolshevik minority in Georgia, and knew Stalin and his brother-in-law, Alexander Svanidze. In Switzerland, he met Lenin, as well as his own future wife Minadora, Sergo Ordjonikiże’s sister, and graduated from the University of Geneva law faculty. In 1934, he was appointed rector of TSU, People’s Commissar of Education, director of the Georgian branch of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and chairman of the Writers’ Union of Georgia. In 1936, Torošeliże was arrested, and a year later, executed on charges of “right-Trotskyist activities”; he was rehabilitated in 1956.

20. Beso Žgenti, “S΄΄ezd velikogo edineniia,” Literaturnaia Gruziia 18, no. 9 (September, 1974): 47–55, here 52–53.

21. This interpretation may seem exaggerated. However, while working on a textbook on the history of Georgia in 1945, Stalin directly pointed out the model character of this textbook for textbooks on the history of other Union republics. See Niko Berżenišvili, “Stumrad Stalint‘an,” C‘iskari, no. 1 (January 1998): 96–111, here 100.

22. Žgenti, “S΄΄ezd velikogo edineniia,” 52.

23. “Tell Georgian writers on my behalf that if they cannot create something similar to what our predecessors in the field of literature and culture created, let them at least be able to show this legacy.” Ibid.

24. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1986), 52.

25. Ibid, 58.

26. Ibid.

27. Among the authors of Torošeliże’s report were prominent historians, philologists and critics: former social-federalist Pavle Ingoroqva (1893–1983), Alexandre Baramiże (1902–1994), later the editor of a multivolume history of Georgian literature, Mikheil Zandukeli (1889–1968), a former national democrat and MP, and Geronti K‘ik‘oże (1880–1968).

28. Evgeny Dobrenko refers to the post-war period as the “time of the accomplished utopia” (see Evgeny Dobrenko, “Sotsrealisticheskii mimesis, ili ‘zhizn΄ v ee revoliutsionnom razvitii,’” in H. Gunther and E. Dobrenko, Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St. Petersburg, 2000), 459–72, here 460. Dobrenko, relying on the monograph by L. P. Aleksandrova, Sovetskii istoricheskii roman i voprosy istorizma (Kyiv, 1971), defines historicism as “an image of the past as the authorities would like to see it here and now.” Hans Gunther notes, “[I]nstead of the previous futuristic orientation, the vector of socialist realist time is aimed not at the ideal future, but at the past, since the guiding principle of socialist realism—the principle of narodnost΄—is internally more rooted in the past than in the future. Socialist realism does not imply a ‘leap into the future’ but continuity and eternal values.” (Hans Gunther, “Sotsrealizm i utopicheskoe myshlenie,” in Gunther and Dobrenko, Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, 41–49, here 46. Unlike Dobrenko and Gunther, I believe that socialist realism implies knowing the end of history and evaluating historical or literary phenomena and figures from the point of view of this end. For socialist realism, both directions are obligatory: the past and the present receive the status of reality precisely from the not yet arrived but undoubted end of history.

29. For the controversy surrounding Micišvili’s article, see Giorgi Maisuradze and Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, Sonniges Georgien (Berlin, 2015), 46.

30. See Zaal Andronikashvili, Emzar Jgerenaia, and Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, Landna(h)me Georgien (Berlin, 2018): 267–92.

31. Ibid., 292.

32. See Maisuradze and Thun-Hohenstein, Sonniges Georgien, 57.

33. The novels were originally written in German. On the Kardu myth, see Akaki Bak‘raże, Kardu anu Grigol Robak‘iżis c‘xovreba da ġvacli (Tbilisi, 1999), 87.

34. Ibid.

35. Zaal Andronikashvili, “Georgian Political Romanticism in the Caucasus” in Hubertus Jahn and Jörn Retterath, eds., Identities and Representations in Georgia from the 19th Century to the Present (Berlin 2021), 137–49.

36. Bak‘raże, Kardu, 87.

37. “If it is proved that Shariah is needed, let it be Shariah. The Soviet government does not intend to declare war on Shariah.” I.V. Stalin, “Vystuplenie na s΄΄ezde narodov Terkskoi oblasti 17 noiabria 1920 g.,” in I.V. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 4, (Moscow 1953), 4:399–407, here 402.

38. Andronikashvili, Jgerenaia, and Thun-Hohenstein, Landna(h)me Georgien, 377–88.

39. Kandid Č‘arkviani and Simon Č‘ik‘ovani, eds., Akhali Kolkhida (Tbilisi, 1937), 7.

40. Ibid., 6. There is no archaeological evidence of the Argonauts myth. Greek colonies in the eastern Black Sea region were later than the heyday of the Colchis culture.

41. Ibid., 5. The Georgian cultural researcher Zurab Kiknaże describes a similar story related to Queen Tamar. Zurab Kiknaże, “Zġva da xmelet‘i k‘art‘ul mit‘osši,” Semiotika, no. 8 (2010): 136–56, here 142, 146. In this case, it does not matter whether the editors of The New Colchis were familiar with this legend (which is unlikely). It is more important to generate similar structures of the mythological plot.

42. Michael Kunichika wrote about the linear archeological plot of the Dneproges. Unlike the latter the archaeological plot of Colchis rejected the linearity and adopted the “renaissance” model. Michael Kunichika, “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Boston 2015), 271–79.

43. Evgeny Dobrenko finds a similar form of content not limited by the form in the translations of Suleiman Stalskii. See Evgeny Dobrenko, “Naideno v perevode,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 78, no. 4 (2011). See also Ursula Justus, “Vozvrashchenie v rai: Sotsrealizm i fol΄klor,” in Gunther and Dobrenko, Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, 70–86, here 71 passim.

44. Hans Gunther defined “totalitarian aesthetics” as “mytholog[y] dressed in realistic clothing.” Gunther, “Totalitarnoe gosudarstvo kak sintez iskusstv,” in Gunther and Dobrenko, eds., Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, 7–15, here 10.

45. See Evgeny Dobrenko, Pozdnii Stalinizm: Estetika politiki, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2020), 319–24.

46. Stalin’s stylization as Prometheus and the successor to the history of Georgia was not Gamsaxurdia’s invention, but rather an established figure of Georgian Staliniana. See Maisuradze and Thun-Hohenstein, Sonniges Georgien, 247.

47. In December 1942, a discussion about Gamsaxurdia’s novel, devoted in no small part to the (pseudo)archaic language of the author, took place in Tbilisi. The report on the discussion occupied a whole page in the central republican newspaper Komunisti, which in and of itself showed that the novel went beyond the framework of literary fact. Gamsaxurdia’s sublime, pseudo-archaic style not only largely determined the subsequent style of the Great Georgian Novel but also influenced the literary Georgian language as a whole.

48. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 10. In this context, see also the analysis of the genres of the epic and the novel in the context of Bakhtin and Lukács in the work of Katerina Clark and Galina Belaia. In the socialist realist historical narrative, the future is also closed, as is the past in Bakhtin’s understanding of the epic. The closed nature of a certain future makes almost all of history closed. There is no longer a place for dialectics in it; it is known and can only be sung epically. See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 38–39; Galina Belaia, “Sovetskii roman-epopeia” in Gunther, Dobrenko, Sotsrealisticheskiĭ kanon, 853–73.

49. Gamsakhudia’s last novel, The Blossom of the Vine (1951–56), is a variation of the New Colchis metaplot, this time set in a Kakhetian village.

50. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History (Richmond, 2000), 279.

51. Ibid.

52. Timothy K. Blauvelt and Jeremy Smith, eds., Georgia after Stalin: Nationalism and Soviet Power (London, 2016).

53. Ot‘ar Čxeiże had made his debut back in the 1940s, but Haze Heat is the most famous novel of the “chronicle of Georgia” (1950–2005) cycle, filmed by Giorgi Šengelaia in 1984 under the title “The Journey of a Young Composer.”

54. See Lev Anninskii, “Doroga i obryv,” Druzhba narodov, no. 11 (2000).

55. Čilaże, by the time of his novel (1973), was most likely reading García Márquez; the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) was translated into Russian in 1970; Guram Doč‘anašvili in the novel The First Garment (1975) refers to the theme of Canudos, to which Mario Vargas Llosa refers in the novel The War of the End of the World (1981). The proximity of the Georgian novel to “magical realism” arises both in terms of the reception of Latin American prose, primarily that of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, and in the actualization of the tradition of Georgian “mythological realism” (Robak‘iże). In the Georgian case, the Yoknapatawpha novels by William Faulkner should be included among the texts with which the novels of the Georgian thaw resonate (Katerina Clark writes that for Soviet literary criticism, recognizing the influence of magical realism, for example, on Chingiz Aitmatov, was more convenient than recognizing the influence of Faulkner), as well as Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers.

56. Fredric Jameson argued in his article (“Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 [Autumn 1986]: 65–88) that “all third-world texts are necessarily. . . national allegories. . . even when. . . their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel” (85). Jameson derived this seemingly structural “obligation” from the geopolitical projection of the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave: only the slave (that is, the third world) could comprehend the material conditions of his existence while the master (the first world) was sentenced to “idealism.” I am far from such generalizations. However, there is a connection between different kinds of subordination and an appeal to history in its various forms: from idealization of the past, to subordination in the myth of the golden age, to attempts at a historical comprehension of subordination.

57. A similar idea was expressed by the critic Lev Anninskiĭ, but he did not develop it. Katerina Clark writes about the connection of Aitmatov’s novels to socialist realism in the article “The Mutability of the Canon: Socialist Realism and Chingiz Aitmatov’s I dol΄she veka dlitsia den΄,” Slavic Review 43, no. 4 (Winter 1984), 587. We can argue with Clark about Aitmatov’s (or, for example, the Georgian Thaw authors’) belonging to socialist realism, as Thomas Lahusen does in “Sotsializm v poiskakh svoikh beregov: Neskol΄ko istoricheskikh zamechanii otnositel΄no ‘esteticheski otkrytoi sistemy pravdivogo izobrazheniia zhizhi,’” in Gunther and Dobrenko, Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, 523–38, here 528–29. However, it is undeniable that the Soviet literature of the 1960s and 1970s is built on the literature of socialist realism and uses its forms and/or certain formal elements.

58. For more detail on the Georgian reception of the myth of the Argonauts, see Andronikashvili, Jgerenaia, and Thun-Hohensteisn, Landna(h)me Georgien, 337.

59. Otar Chiladze, A Man Was Going Down the Road, trans. Donald Rayfield (London, 2012).

60. See Zaal Andronikashvili, “Black Sea Identity and the Autochthon Logic of Thalassophobia,” in Ivan Biliarsky, Ovidiu Cristea, and Anca Oroveanu, eds., The Balkans and Caucasus: Parallel Processes on the Opposite Sides of the Black Sea (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2012), 295–304; Andronikashvili, Jgerenaia, Thun-Hohenstein, Landna(h)me Georgien, 389.

61. Jan Assmann, “Das Grab als Vorschule der Literatur im alten Ägypten,” in Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Christof Hardmeier, eds., Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation (München, 1983), 64−94, here 79.

62. The version in the journal was serialized from February 1972 to March 1975. The first part was published in book form in 1973, the second in 1975. The second edition (in one volume) was printed in 1978. It took the author ten years to write the novel. The Georgian book edition was almost 900 pages in length. In 1976, an authorized translation into Russian was published. In 1977 the book was made into a film, and its hero, Dat‘a T‘ut‘ašxia, performed by Ot‘ar Meġvinet‘uxuc‘esi, immediately became a national hero.

63. In western Georgia, a robber is called an abragi, a cognate of the word abrek, which is now entrenched in the Russian language and has a common North Caucasian origin.

64. The figure of a robber appeared earlier in Ilia Čavčavaże’s poem “Several pictures or episodes from the life of a robber” (1860).

65. Eka Meskhi, “Maidens and Mothers: Political Iconography of Georgian Democratic Republic,” in Giorgi Maisuradze and Luka Nakhutsrishvili, eds., Georgian Democratic Republic 1918–1921: In Search for Form and Content (Tbilisi, 2023) (forthcoming).

66. In the second edition of the novel (as well as in the Russian translation), the reference to the fourteenth century manuscript, which localized the golden age historically in the twelfth century, is absent, emphasizing the mythical quality and timelessness of the novel’s epigraphs.

67. Revaz Siraże, “Dat‘a T‘ut‘ašxia,” C‘iskari 226, no. 3 (March 1976): 97–109, here 98. Akaki Bak΄raże, researching the etymology of the surname T‘ut‘ašxia, translates it as the “son” of the knight T΄ut΄ašxi.

68. Chabua Amirejibi, Data Tutashkhia, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (Leningrad, 1985), 9. (These quotations are from the edition still in print, with the kind permission of Bakur Sulakauri Publishing).

69. On the form of the socialist realist novel, see Hans Gunther, “Zhiznennye fazy sotsrealisticheskogo kanona,” in Gunther and Dobrenko, Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, 281–88, here 284. See also Clark, The Soviet Novel.

70. Amirejibi’s novel does not lose the connection to the novel of socialist realism. It simultaneously correlates with the socialist realist novel, through its “monumentality” and “epic” features, through its “positive hero” and, in general, the lofty interpretation of the main characters, and with the modernist Georgian novel through its interpretation of issues of national history. The destabilizing of the grand narrative would allow Amirejibi’s novel to be classified as postmodern. Still, a great number of other features—the generally sublime register, the lack of ironic distance among the novel’s characters, and the absence of open intertextual games—do not allow this question to even be posed: the novel still fully belongs with modernist literature.