The Rationale for the Comparison

Examining the relationship between literature and nationalism is not a novelty to nationalism studies (see Anderson Reference Anderson1991; Corse Reference Corse1997). A number of interdisciplinary perspectives reflect on the role of poetry in the construction of national ideology, although not in the similar breadth to that of the role and influence of literature (Finnin Reference Finnin2011; Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson, Hutchinson and Smith1994). Poems and prose unfold as national discourse is being constructed, yet often the extent to which they influence social mobilization or how literary experience shapes the making of political life is either ignored or not taken seriously (Gould Reference Gould2014, 23; Hutchinson and Aberbach Reference Hutchinson and Aberbach1999). This article has a twofold purpose: first, it enriches the comparative literature on nationalism studies by portraying shifting dynamics of relationship between lyrical poetry and national mobilization in tsarist Ukraine and Georgia; second, it illustrates the role of both poets in constructing nationalist narratives. Further, it speculates about the variances between the two case studies.

A reference to national poetry in political discourse may construct a powerful symbolic meaning that could create a continuum between the past and present. Nationalist political elites often refer to “cultural nationalists” (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson, Hutchinson and Smith1994) for reinventing the narratives of glorious past or othering selves from the oppressive ideologies (Tilly Reference Tilly2008), and so forth. An observer who has followed political situation in Georgia and Ukraine in the era of the so-called Colored Revolutions (2003 in Georgia and 2004 in Ukraine) would have noticed recurring references to Ilia Chavchavadze (known simply as Ilia to Georgians) and Taras Shevchenko in the statements of leading politicians. The two poets were often mentioned in a similar vein as “founding father(s) of nations.” When seeking public legitimacy, leading Ukrainian and Georgian politicians often cited their works, reflected on their key ideas, and (re)interpreted their thoughts. Soon after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, for example, speaking at a Taras Shevchenko memorial opening ceremony, President Victor Yushchenko emphasized the importance of Shevchenko’s poetry for the liberation of Ukraine. “… our Kobzar [in reference to Shevchenko] chose the word to be his profession and his weapon in hard times since that was the only way of fighting for Ukraine,” asserted Yushchenko, soon to be followed by the reference to the role of Shevchenko in maintaining Ukrainian culture and statehood: “… every state begins with language. When the language is lost, the people lose culture. As a result, territorial integrity is lost; the nation is lost. Therefore, Taras’s choice was a wise one.” Yushchenko further stressed how well aware the poet was about the future of Ukraine: “Being today close to Taras Shevchenko at Chernecha HoraFootnote ¹ means knowing what the future of Ukraine will be like” (Yushchenko, Our Ukraine Press, 2004).

Similar references could be found in speeches of the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. In a “hybrid nationalist” discourse (Metreveli Reference Metreveli2016), in which Saakashvili intertwined ethno-religious particularism with elements of civic nationalism, he compared Chavchavadze (himself by that point an Orthodox Saint) to Patriarch Ilia 2nd of the Georgian Orthodox Church who, according to Saakashvili, “… did the same in 1970s what Chavchavadze did in 19th century, when the latter managed to establish a ‘new Georgian identity’ based on multi-century traditions” (Saakashvili 2010, Civil.Ge, December 30, 2010). Often misinterpreting Chavchavadze’s writings to suit political context or legitimize partisan agenda, Saakashvili referred to the poet’s social thought as an example of how state interests should be understood by citizens: “[Chavchavadze] had permanently tried to prove and show to Georgians that the state interest is higher than private issues of each member of the society” (Saakashvili, InterpressNews, November 6, 2009).

Disregarding political rhetoric, Chavchavadze and Shevchenko emerged as important symbols of friendship between the two states after the Colored Revolutions. Upon the invitation of President Saakashvili, President Yushchenko attended the opening ceremony of the Taras Shevchenko square with a monument to the poet in 2007. Perhaps even more symbolically, the Shevchenko monument was erected at the entrance of Ilia Chavchavadze avenue in central Tbilisi.

Shevchenko’s and Chavchavadze’s names were used in the Soviet state discourse, and after the Soviet collapse, almost every important political figure in Ukraine and Georgia referred to their poetry in some form or the other. For example, Kinzer reported: “Leftists in Georgia embrace Chavchavadze for his hatred of injustice, centrists love him for his nonviolent humanism, and right-wing nationalists have adopted his slogan ‘Homeland, Language, Religion’” (New York Times, May 7, 1998). The selected works of Shevchenko were taught at Soviet high schools. His poetry was portrayed as a manifestation of solidarity with working class people, while his monuments erected on the territories of the Soviet Union corroborated the image of Shevchenko as a socialist poet. Chavchavadze’s work went through a slightly different trajectory. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, his works were banned and removed from public school books. However, in the 1930s Chavchavadze’s image was restored, monuments erected, and selected works again published upon the orders of the Georgian-Soviet dictator Stalin.

Despite the immense importance of the two poets in cultural and symbolic life of their respective societies, to this day there has been surprisingly little scholarly research comparing works and activities of Chavchavadze and Shevchenko and their impact on national mobilization in tsarist Ukraine and Georgia. Why has this comparison been ignored in the literature? More importantly, what does this comparative inquiry tell the reader about the basic relation between lyric poetry and nationalism? These questions are especially puzzling given that their poems and writings largely addressed similar themes: both of them advocated for solidarity among the social classes and opposed the same enemy—the tsarist Russian state. The general pathos and form of writing cemented their popularity and established their works as national folk art. In addition, besides several common themes in their artistic activity, both popularized their native languages: Georgian and Ukrainian, respectively.Footnote ²

Moreover, beyond similarity in contexts, both of them were educated in the Russian Empire. Chavchavadze became a founder of the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians, while Shevchenko was a founder of the cultural organization Hromada and a member of the short-lived Cyril-Methodius Brotherhood. The social backgrounds of the two poets were quite different, yet their styles of writing resonated with common patterns. Shevchenko, a son of a peasant, was originally a serf himself. His writing style was a recollection of his own experience of a life in the village and interaction with common people (Drahomanov Reference Drahomanov and Luckyj1879, 78). Shevchenko’s works at the later stage of his artistic career were shaped by the ideas of European republicanism of the Decembrist period, Cossack republicanism, and Haydamak era (Plokhy Reference Plokhy2012, 79). Chavchavadze, a St. Petersburg–educated lawyer, was a man of nobility, holding the status of Tavadi, or baron, yet his writings echoed the struggles of peasants. His writing style bridged the gap between high Georgian (the language which the older generation of Georgian nobility used) and the new Georgian, more accessible for the masses (Manning Reference Manning2012).

Structurally, this article first defines a few main concepts and scrutinizes the phenomenological relationship between them. It further examines the political context under which the two poets lived. Later follows a discussion of major trajectories that 19th-century nationalist movements underwent. The article continues with an analysis of the works of Shevchenko and Chavchavadze and an examination of how nationalism, poetry, and social mobilization interact in particular historical context and under certain social and political settings, and why poetry rather than prose promoted Georgian and Ukrainian nationalisms.

Poetry Versus Prose: Contrasting Mediums of Nationalism

Prior to elaborating the discussion any further, it is worth clarifying a few key concepts and taking a closer look at the relationship between them. When referring to a nation, I mean “a historical community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory, or homeland, sharing a distinct language and culture” (Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1995, 11). I do not understand the “historical community” as a given entity (or in Anthony Smith’s words “ethnie”), but rather I adopt a modernist approach to the study of nation hypothesizing it as a modern phenomenon (see Gellner Reference Gellner1983). Anthony Smith defines ethnie as “a human population with shared myths of ancestry, common historical memories, one or more elements of culture, a link with a territory, and a measure of solidarity, at least among the elites” (Smith Reference Smith2003, 359). Unlike nations, ethnies mostly had no bordered territory nor “a public mass culture,” or identical legal conditions for its members. However, they passed down shared values, memories, and symbols to their “inheritors,” the nations. The ethnies appear to be the preexisting types of modern nations: “ethnie [serves] as a usual preparatory stage for the nation” (Guibernau and Hutchinson Reference Guibernau and Hutchinson2004, 4; insertion added).

I agree with Smith’s definition of nationalism as “an ideological movement to attain and maintain autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population, some of whose members believe it to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’” (Smith Reference Smith2009, 61). In a sense, nationalism is a project, or “the making of combined claims, on behalf of a population, to identity, to jurisdiction and to territory ...” (Hearn Reference Hearn2006, 11). These claims are legitimated by popular support and are most often communicated (articulated) through mass communication. The collective claim to identity may include “... ‘cultural’ factors as religious beliefs or language, or notions of shared biological substance, or of inherited historical experiences, but it can also invoke more abstract qualities such as core values (e.g., egalitarianism, liberty, democracy)” (Hearn Reference Hearn2006, 11–12).

Vital for the conceptual framework of this article is a distinction between poetry and prose. Bakhtin (1981, 287) elegantly summarizes the qualitative divergences between the novel and poem when comparing the poet, who, he argues, even while speaking of alien things speaks in his own language, with a novelist, who speaks of his own world in an alien language. The main challenge in reading the novel, for Bakhtin, is lack of dialogue between the text and outside world. Yet, for him, poetry and prose differ in their representation and assessment of time.

Within the typology of poetry, one needs to distinguish between epic and lyric poetry. Epic poetry, for example, narrates and assigns exceptional value to the heroic past, producing the sense of having been there before everyone else; thus an epic poem is a carrier of primordial national culture (Manning Reference Manning2008, 329). It further separates the past from the present in the imagining of fellow contemporaries. If the novel is oriented on the social and the “imagining” of comradeship through its sociocentric model for the national imagining, epic poetry grounds the narrative in an ancient past (van der Veer Reference Veer2001). Lyric poetry frames the revolt of the “I” against colonialism as a revolt of the “I” against an oppressive society, and is modern in character. “The ‘I’ whose voice is heard in the lyric,” asserts Adorno, “is an ‘I’ that defines and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective, to objectivity” (Adorno 1991, 41). Yet, he adds, despite being defined by the “I,” lyric poetry is also the “we,” as it captures the historical moment within its bounds (46). As opposed to epic, lyric poems address the “I” of the nation, thus constructing a modern horizontal imagining under which the communities of strangers bond together against the oppressive machinery of the “other,” the colonizer. Unlike the newspaper, which generates the “stranger sociability” through daily experience of reading and reflection of the similar geographical space, the lyric poem is much more private and individual text voicing the “I.” The revolt against the oppressive colonizer situates the poem as a means for progressive (modern) as opposed to backward (feudal) imaginary space (Manning Reference Manning2012, 83).

Anderson refers to the novel as a medium for transmission of nationalism and creation of modern nations. The translations of the holy books and the development of mass printing (“print capitalism” in Anderson’s terms) in the vernacular enabled modern communities to read in the same language—to make ultimate and intimate contact with imagined comradeship. If the newspaper was a medium for common imagination based on the sense of contemporaneity, the very structure of the novel made “the collective simultaneity of the private act of reading” (van der Veer Reference Veer2001, 120) a vital part of common imagining. Common experience of print textuality influenced the creation of nations, or “imagined communities” (Anderson Reference Anderson1991, 16). The 19th century Georgian newspaper Droeba, for example, to which Chavchavadze actively contributed, represented “the juxtaposition of heterogeneous correspondence and other genres on a single dated issue of a newspaper,” which in turn stipulated the creation of the intersubjective space-time of Georgian readers (Manning Reference Manning2012, 82). If in the Western scholarly discourse (for example, Anderson’s concept of “print culture” or Warner’s understanding of publicFootnote ³), “the conception of a public, is at least imagined as a complete transposability and reciprocity of perspectives between writers and readers and those written about, ‘the people’ and ‘the public’ are imagined to be the same” (Manning Reference Manning2012, 96). Quite different is the social imaginary in the 19th century tsarist territories of Georgia, for example, in which the “people” (illiterate folk) are not yet “the public” (Georgian upper class) (96). The non-existence of “stranger sociability” between the Georgian urban intelligentsia (the public) and illiterate peasants (the people), which manifested itself in the correspondence in the feuilleton section of the newspaper Droeba, one might argue, hindered the creation of “imagined communities” in Anderson’s classical definition.

What is perhaps missed from Anderson’s seminal account are “monumental texts” as expressions of the nationalist imagination in the form of ancient epic poems. Epic poems were more important for nationalism than novels. van der Veer (Reference Veer2001, 130) writes that “written texts have a certain ‘consultability,’ but they do not fixate a tradition entirely” as opposed to ancient epic poems, ritual performance, and so forth. Epic poems were foundational for both religious and nationalist claim-making and interpretation of history. The epic poems were important imaginaries for Georgian and Ukrainian nationalism, but they led to different imaginings. Lyric poetry expressed the subjectivity of being modern (Manning Reference Manning2012), while the epic poem dealt with proto-modern ethnies. Lyric poetry was the transition between the modern collectivity of the novel and the ancient collectivity of the epic poem. In a poetic form, lyric showed the modern revolt of the “I” against colonial society.

The editing of epic poems often recovered the national/religious past, stipulated the othering of “invaders,” and codified the eternal existence of nation in the historical memory of communities through rhyme (van der Veer Reference Veer2001, 120–127). In Georgia’s case, the 12th-century epic poem Vepkhistkaosani (The Knight in Panther’s Skin) written by Shota Rustaveli constituted a “monumental text,” which made the case for antiquity of Georgian churches and religion as well as ethnic identity (Manning Reference Manning2008, 331). A Ukrainian replication of “monumental text” could be Shevchenko’s Haidamaky (1845) (Koropeckyj Reference Koropeckyj2011, 455). In fact, Chavchavadze led the movement to create a “monumental” edition of Vepkhistakoisani to narrow the divide between the enlightened and literate Georgian “society” (sazogadoeba) and the largely illiterate Georgian “people” (Manning and Shatirishvili Reference Manning and Shatirishvili2010). However, instead of serving the purpose of building the horizontal comradeship, the limited edition became an elitist project for the cabinets of the aristocracy with which Chavchavadze objected (Soslan in Manning and Shatirishvili Reference Manning and Shatirishvili2010).

Social and Political Context in Tsarist Georgia and Ukraine

Shevchenko and Chavchavadze lived during two different periods in tsarist imperial history. Shevchenko operated under serfdom, while Chavchavadze witnessed both serfdom and the period of reform within the empire and its abolition in 1861, which perhaps influenced the predisposition of Georgian society to (political) nationalism as opposed to the Ukrainian context during the period of Shevchenko’s activity (Plokhy Reference Plokhy2006). As Manning noted, Ilia wrote “… at a time when a Georgian print culture and a class of intelligentsia were emerging from the manuscript culture and court sociability of the nobility,” and “… he straddled both spheres as noble and writer of poetic manuscripts and printed prose” (Manning Reference Manning2012, 32). When Shevchenko started his public activity, Ukrainian separate identity was largely denied by the tsarist government and intellectuals (Grabowicz Reference Grabowicz1995; Yekelchyk Reference Yekelchyk2007). However, interest in linguistic differences between the Russians and Ukrainians was recognized by the imperial society, which explains why Shevchenko’s Kobzar was published in St. Petersburg. Georgian identity, language, and culture were not under question from tsarist authorities. Georgians were “othered” by the authorities more than Ukrainians mainly because of significant linguistic and cultural differences. To eliminate those differences, tsarist ideologists targeted key elements of Georgian national identity: the Georgian language and the Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC). The usage of Georgian language in liturgy education and publishing was prohibited, and the autocephaly (autonomy) of the church abolished.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the period when Georgia was annexed by the Russian Empire, the country was already politically and culturally divided. The western parts were under the (religious and cultural) domination of the Ottoman Empire, whereas the eastern regions were under the influence of Qajar Iran. Annulment of the GOC as an independent institution (in 1811) coincided with internal rivalries among the local political “elites” and failed anti-imperial conspiracies. These circumstances hindered the creation of a common, collective (national) identity (Jones Reference Jones1987; Reisner Reference Reisner2009).Footnote ⁴ The tsarist authorities removed aristocratic ranks and privileges from Georgian elites, replacing them with Russian officials on highest positions in the local government. Those who opted for cooperation with the tsarist regime benefited from upward mobility (Ram and Shatirishvili Reference Ram and Shatirishvili2004, 24). Unlike in Ukraine, where being Ukrainian was not a stumbling block for the upward mobility for the elites (Grabowicz Reference Grabowicz1995), being Georgian—speaking or religious service in the Georgian language—was interpreted among the ruling elites as disloyalty to the tsarist state (Gvosdev Reference Gvosdev2000).

If Georgia was ideologically (and culturally) divided between the influences of Russian and Ottoman empires as well as Qajar Iran, between the late 18th and the early 20th century, Ukrainian territories were influenced by Habsburg and Russian empires. Unlike Georgia, which was far more isolated from egalitarian ideas, Ukraine in the Western parts experienced the spread of modern nationalist ideas. The Eastern parts of Ukraine, however, remained loyal to the Russian monarchy, and not just politically; they also assimilated linguistically and culturally (Yekelchyk Reference Yekelchyk2007, ch. 2). As Snyder called it, there existed arguably “two very different Ukraines” (2003, 119). Russian authorities labelled Ukraine as “Little Russia (Malorossiia),” “little Russian tribe of the Russian people” (Yekelchyk Reference Yekelchyk2007, 52), and “Southern Rus” (Miller Reference Miller2003, 25),Footnote ⁵ whereas Valuev Circular of 1863 claimed that a Ukrainian language “did not, does not and cannot exist” (Grabowicz Reference Grabowicz1995, 680). Even during 19th-century Russian imperialism, Ukrainians were not targets of the radical ethno-nationalists since they were not labelled as “non-Russians” (Slocum Reference Slocum1998). Ongoing legal reforms both in Habsburg and in Russian monarchies resulted in new opportunities for spreading of Shevchenko’s poetry (Grabowitz 1995). Publications in Ukrainian were largely censored, yet intellectual discourse on matters of Ukrainofilstvo (Ukrainian Movement) continued.

The role and function of the poet in the borderlands of tsarist Russia was mainly to echo the “plaintive cry of the people … and implicitly translate it into a political program of action” (Manning Reference Manning2012, 192). Eastern European intellectuals embraced the ideas originating from German Romanticism, predominantly emphasizing shared language and culture as a pillar of nationalist mobilization (Yekelchyk Reference Yekelchyk2007, ch. 2). Echoing anticolonial social thought (Bhaba 1995; Dei Reference Dei2000; Dei and Asgharzadeh Reference Dei and Asgharzadeh2001), Miroslav Hroch described the three-phase trajectory that Eastern European nationalist movements underwent before reaching a massive scale. The first phase was when intellectuals triggered interest not only in their own culture and history, but also in differentiating their sociocultural and linguistic differences from those of the “Other” neighboring groups. These intellectuals emerged as mediating agencies of nationalism for the populations that were excluded both socio-politically and from the hegemonic power structures of the ruling state (Spivak Reference Spivak1999). “Scholarly interest” evolved into second phase of “patriotic agitation,” when a newly emerged group of intellectuals started to awaken their compatriots about the potential of forming the common nation or agitated for the forming of an independent statehood (Hroch Reference Miroslav2000, ch. 6). In Georgia and Ukraine, the oppressive policies of the empires and lack of national unity among communities appeared as obstacles for the development of patriotic agitation into a third phase of full-blown nationalist mobilization. Therefore, despite being elitist in character, lyric poetry as opposed to epic poetry emerged as a powerful mechanism for construction of common imagining among Georgians.

The Prophets of National Liberation: The Awakening of Nations

The two intellectuals differed in terms of the volume of poetry and the extent of political activity. For example, Shevchenko’s “Kobzar” collection was translated into more than 100 languages, and his poetry garnered international scholarship, as opposed to a rather limited scholarly interest in Ilia Chavchavadze’s poetry [with the exception of prolific works by Manning (Reference Manning2004, Reference Manning2012), Ram and Shatirishvili (Reference Ram and Shatirishvili2004), and Gould (Reference Gould2014)]. In his remarkable account of Shevchenko’s life and poetry, Grabowicz (Reference Grabowicz1982) reflected on some of the dominant themes in his works and described his art as “mythopoesis,” through which, he asserted, Shevchenko mythologized the Ukraine’s historical past, in particular the Cossack Hetmanate.

In his “Friendly Epistle” (1845), Shevchenko attacks the Ukrainian Cossack hetmans for being “Warsaw trash,” “slaves, toadies and the filth of Moscow,” and loyal to foreign powers:

For these very lines, Shevchenko was criticized by the leading Polish intellectual journal for exalting haidamak killings of Poles. “Cossack tradition,” according to Sereda, “was discarded as inappropriate for a genuine national idea” (2014, 176). In a poem dedicated to the Ukrainian writer Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko (1778–1843), Shevchenko is pessimistic about the return of freedom:

As Sereda argued, “Ukrainophiles of his generation favored those poems of Shevchenko that offered a romantic vision of Ukraine’s past, and did not fully understand the poet’s views on Ukrainian history” (2014, 171).

In line with Shevchenko, Ilia is critical of the past. Georgian historians, as he asserted, created the history about kings, where Georgian people were unseen. His anti-elitism is intertwined with critique of religious asceticism (a popular form of protest among Georgian youth at the time and also a legacy of the past) (Wardrop and Wardrop Reference Wardrop and Wardrop1987). Education is a “faithful bridge between darkness and light”; hence the younger generations should have been exposed to this environment for the sake of saving Georgian ethnicity from Russification rather than going into monastic asceticism or melancholy over the past (Chavchavadze in Reisner Reference Reisner2009, 40). In the poem “Gandegili” (“The Hermit,” 1883), Chavchavadze illustrated the negative aspects of religious asceticism as a way of social and cultural self-realization. Ilia encouraged the newer generations to be involved in social activism, acquire education, and fight for the freedom of their Mamuli (Fatherland). For him, the Fatherland had religious and metaphysical connotations. He idealized it in a way similar to the way the concept of God was idealized in the earlier days of Georgian poetry and literature (Manning Reference Manning2012). Fatherland appeared to be the god-like divine idea; as an abstract concept, it was based on belief and love: “If one did not believe in Fatherland, s/he could not fall in love with it, and if one could not fall in love with it, s/he would neither see it nor believe in it” wrote Chavchavadze (Wardrop and Wardrop Reference Wardrop and Wardrop1987, 36).

Chavchavadze believed in the moral revival of Georgians, and in this process religion was not rejected, but it was an accompaniment of modernization serving a function of “moral purification” of the nation. Orthodox faith was to him a protector from foreign cultural penetrations of Georgian’s traditional sociocultural spheres, or in Partha Chatterjee’s (Reference Chatterjee1993) words, defending the “innerness” of Georgian national culture. In one of his seminal poems, “Bednieri Eri” (Happy Nation, 1871), Chavchavadze attacks the Georgian “apathetic mind-set” for not having a sense of solidarity and unity. Arguably he refers to the historically failed rebellions and rampant conformism of the tsarist loyalist ruling elites:

“Bednieri Eri” echoes the pathos of Shevchenko’s “My Friendly Epistle” (1845), in which Shevchenko explicitly attacks those he calls nedoliudy (translated as cruel people) who betray their own brothers and sisters for their personal gains (Drai-Khmara Reference Drai-Khmara and Luckyj1930). Shevchenko is sarcastic about intellectual elites:

Shevchenko problematizes the exploitation of the Ukrainian people by the ruling elites and compares it to blasphemy. In being critical toward elites, he used the language “… not from the large towns, not from the self-acclaimed academies, not from the midst of the luminaries and the powerful … the language of the country and the village alone served his purposes” (Kulish Reference Kulish and Luckyj1861, 61). Rural Ukraine marks the subject of his activism, yet the multifaceted nature of his work craftily forges the “village” folk and the spirit of a nation or a “people” to advocate for “the idea of social solidarity of previously denationalized pany (lords) with narod (the people)” (Sereda Reference Sereda2014, 178).

In his programmatic Mgzavris Tserilebi (Traveller’s Notes 1861), Chavchavadze problematized the conflict between the generations: those who were exposed to Russian education and returned to the homeland for the sake of its modernization, and the elites who were against the modernization of Georgia. Ilia portrays himself as a medium between the colonizer (tsarist Russia) and the colonized (Georgian people): “Chavchavadze radically revises the geopoetics characteristic of these earlier Romantics, which as often as not sought to align Georgia with Russia against the Caucasus, by creating a novel geopoetics in which the Caucasus, in the form of the Terek River, is identified with Georgia as opposed to Russia” (Manning Reference Manning2012, 29–30). Ilia develops a civic idea of nationhood in which superiority is given to content over form: “… Georgianness is not a matter of such relatively outward forms (dress, language), but still more inner essence, a matter ‘of the heart’” (Manning Reference Manning2012, 52). In Chavchavadze’s view, the idea of the modernization of Georgian society should happen through the establishment of a standardized “high culture.” As Manning points out, “… debates concerning the modernization and popularization of a Georgian print language and print culture were conducted in a typically classical and aristocratic form … disseminated ‘domestically’ by mouth or manuscript among members of the Georgian urban gentry, and only later publicized in print” (Manning Reference Manning2012, 32). Unlike other writers of his generation who often employed ethnographic prose as a means for constructing nationalist discourse, Chavchavadze advocates “a naturalized fraternal kinship based on shared language within the speech community of Georgians” and borrows the voice of peasant “I” in his Mgzavris Tserilebi (Manning Reference Manning2004, 47).

In Shevchenko’s narrative of nationhood, the usage of religion is often situational, depending on different periods of his life and circles of intellectuals with which he affiliated himself (Drahomanov Reference Drahomanov and Luckyj1879; Finnin Reference Finnin2005). The narrative of God’s punishment of the unjust, the latter arguably compared to the tsarist oppressors and conformist elites, is manifested in his seminal poem “The Princess” (1847):

Shevchenko touched upon religious themes often for symbolic reasons to portray the drama of political suppression and national suffering, while remaining at the same time more critical toward the church as an institution and religious elites (which he deemed as instruments of Russian imperialism) (Finnin Reference Finnin2011). The role of the Russian Orthodox Church was especially destructive in Ukraine, for it openly promoted the official policies of the Russian government and was a powerful assimilatory instrument (Magocsi Reference Magocsi1996). The poem “Heretic,” for example, illustrated Shevchenko’s wrath against the hypocrisy of the religious elites who, according to him, in the name of Christ annihilated the manifestations of truth and justice to further strengthen the absolutist tsarist hegemony over the repressed society. The present “tomb of a church” must be demolished for a newer and freer church to prevail, wrote Shevchenko (Grabowicz Reference Grabowicz1982, 150):

As Shevelov (Reference Shevelov and George1962, 76) suggests, this might be interpreted as Shevchenko’s vision of independent Ukraine, whereas the contrasted personalities in this poem (the “potbellied leaders of Church”) were an allegorical illustration of his contemporary Russian princes, who were corrupted and oppressive in their treatment of the Ukrainian church and peasantry. In similar vein, in his poem “The Neophytes” (1857), he criticizes religious and political elites: “Vse brekhnia: I tsari I popy!” (All is a lie: the kings and the priests alike!)” (Drahomanov Reference Drahomanov and Luckyj1879, 76). Emerging as mediums of nationalism, through their poetry the two poets confronted the hypocrisies of the tsarist loyalists and called for reawakening and revolting of the “I” (nation) against an oppressive tsarist regime and conformity.

Poetry as Nationalism: Subpoena of Political Action

There is no evidence of direct dialogue between the two poets, yet intertextual similarities between poems demonstrate possible influence. For example, Shevchenko’s “Velykyi l’okh” (“Great Vault,” 1845) may be compared to Chavchavadze’s poem “Bazaleti Lake” (1883). Both poets foresee the birth of a messiah—a rebellious new man to confront the status quo of enslavement. Shevchenko forecasted the birth of a new Ivan Gonta, a leader of the Haidamaka rebellion, who “would let freedom loose throughout Ukraine”; Chavchavadze refers to Queen Tamar of Georgia, a symbol of a unified Georgian state, hoping that a golden cradle at the bottom of the Bazaleti Lake nourishes a new national hero:

Ilia published a translation of Shevchenko’s poem “Naimychka” (“The Servant Girl”) in 1881 (issue 5). This fact shows that Chavchavadze knew Shevchenko’s work; however, we cannot speculate about the possible influence of Shevchenko’s poetry on Ilia’s work. In a conversation with a Georgian poet and a friend of Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli (1840–1915), at the home of the historian Mykola Kostomarov, Shevchenko fascinatingly reiterated a number of common traits that Ukrainian and Georgian people and cultures shared. Shevchenko said about Georgians, “How much in common this nation has with ours!” According to Tsereteli’s memoirs, at the end of the meeting Shevchenko and Tsereteli “parted as friends” (Tsereteli Reference Tsereteli1998, 400–402).

Shevchenko’s “Kavkaz” (“Caucasus,” 1845) is an example of the poet’s solidarity with Caucasian resistance movements against Russian imperialism (Drahomanov Reference Drahomanov and Luckyj1879, 85; Finnin Reference Finnin2005, 425). “Kavkaz” develops the narrative about the suppressed peoples of the Caucasus and calls for their liberation:

Shevchenko compared the “injustice” of Russian policy in the Caucasus to that in Ukraine and called his nation to fight for liberty, rebellion against tsarism, and solidarity to Caucasian people. In the same poem, he criticized the Ukrainians for passivity, he saluted those who resisted the foreign oppression and fought against the status quo in Caucasus, and warned against the “fatal” consequences of melancholy and national apathy. Yet again, this is an overall theme that Chavchavadze developed a few decades later. There are numerous parallels drawn in the poem between Shevchenko’s own Ukraine and the Caucasus, be it relating to the theme of suffering of the common people or prevailing injustice of the oppressive tsarist system that stripped the people’s authentic culture of its unique value (Zaitsev Reference Zaitsev and Luckyj1988). In a prophetic fashion, Shevchenko addresses the revolting Caucasians:

Echoing Shevchenko’s calls for solidarity and comradeship, in “Oriode sitkva tavad revaz shalvas dze eristavis kazlovidan sheshlilis targmanzeda” (“A couple of words on the translation of Kazlov’s The Mad Girl by Prince Revaz Shalvas dze Eristavi,” 1860), Chavchavadze elaborates a program for political and cultural transformation of Georgia, seeing the necessity of a horizontal rather than vertical structure of comradeship in which print language would be accessible to masses and contribute to the formation of modern national consciousness and solidarity. In a similar vein, Shevchenko called for the Ukrainian folk (or narod in his own words) to promote Christian love toward “the least of [their] brothers” (Matthew 25:40) notwithstanding the class differences and social status. He envisions brutal revenge of the suppressed over the suppressors and warns of the “final judgement”:

Ilia fully recognized that Georgia was isolated from Western intellectual thought and largely missed the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He also understood that processes which followed the French Revolution (such as abolition of serfdom, egalitarianism, etc.) were of primary interest to Georgia. An influence of the French Revolution on his social thought is illustrated in one of his poems, “Kartvlis Deda” (Mother of Georgian, 1858). Chavchavadze indirectly refers to the principles liberté, égalité, fraternité and calls on Georgian mothers to raise their children with the ideas of “liberty, unity, fraternity”:

Chavchavadze’s interpretation of territorial nationalism as a Christian duty is by definition Christian. In his effort to portray liberation as a key political agenda of modernity, he intertwines elements of civic and ethnic nationalism. The concept of territoriality (Fatherland) comes across as a new source of loyalty. An adherence to this principle of nationalism is framed as Christian duty.

Several similar themes might be observed in Shevchenko’s collection of poems “Kobzar” (1840, 1844, and 1860) that are in line with ideas of European Enlightenment and French Revolution. The ideas of the insulted woman and humiliated Ukrainian mothers are discussed in other parts of “Kobzar,” particularly the poems “Kateryna” (“Catherine,” 1840) and “Vid’ma” (“The Witch,” 1847). He calls his compatriots to “wake up” from century-long “slumber” and revolt against the moral humiliation of the motherland. An illustration of the author’s strongly anti-tsarist approach was his sarcastic poem “Son” (“The Dream,” 1844), where Moscow-Petersburg elites are portrayed as executioners who crucified Ukraine, attacking Peter I and Catherine II personally with extreme intensity (Drahomanov Reference Drahomanov and Luckyj1879, 78).

The theme of awakening from slumber is present in one of the most fascinating displays of Chavchavadze’s nationalism in a poem dedicated to the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. He named the poem “Mesmis, Mesmis Sanatreli” (“I Hear, Hear the Voice Desired,” 1860), where he wishes the voice of Italian nationalists to be heard in his own Georgia:

Despite efforts of tsarist authorities to censor their works, Chavchavadze’s and Shevchenko’s works of poetry were transmitted by word of mouth and were established as a folk art among the common people. In expressing modern subjectivist position and an individual revolt against society, their lyric poetry served as a transition between the modern collectivity of the novel and pre-modern ethnies of the epic poem.

Poets and Their Social Activity

Beyond their poetry and literary contributions, both intellectuals participated in social life, albeit to a different extent and in diverging forms. Ilia, together with a group of Georgian intellectuals, founded the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians for the official purpose of the “restoration of the oppressed identity” of Georgians [as the founding principles of the organization postulated (Reisner Reference Reisner2009, 44)]. This Society engaged in propagating literacy in Georgian and private school teaching among different social classes. Chavchavadze wrote in one of his publications “Isev ganatlebis sakitkhze” (Again on the Question of Education, 1889) that he saw the “standardized culture” as a “basis for a united Georgian nation” (Reisner Reference Reisner2009, 44). Education would have unified people under the idea of a common past and deepened the interest in studying their history. In line with what Ernest Gellner would elaborate almost a century later on the role of education in the making of nations (Gellner Reference Gellner1983, 48), Chavchavadze did not construe nationality as something inherited or “natural,” nor necessarily having connectivity with one’s past; neither was it fully accidental in all cases. What mattered for Ilia was the transformation of Georgian society from an agrarian, where progress undermined the importance of the older structures, to a modern one.

Unlike Shevchenko, who more “theorized” about modern national belonging through his lyrical poetry, Chavchavadze proposed the removal of six letters from the Georgian alphabet to make the language easier for massive comprehension. By initiating the reform of old Georgian, on a symbolic level he distanced himself from the past, made the language more accessible to the masses, and sought to eradicate the persisting division among Georgians both on vertical (class) and horizontal (regional) levels. “The golden chain shall not overweight freedom,” Ilia wrote, referring to the Georgian bourgeois conformism (Chavchavadze Reference Chavchavadze1860). Chavchavadze’s critique of elites is somewhat in line with Shevchenko’s thoughts about elite conformism: “… cast off chains and cease being the ‘scum of Moscow,’” he demanded from the Ukrainian ruling class (Hrinchenko Reference Hrinchenko and Luckyj1892, 121). As Hrinchenko asserted, Shevchenko called on us to realize that “we are the sons of a great, independent nation, to cease bowing down before Moscow and Warsaw and to turn our attention to achieving national independence” (Hrinchenko Reference Hrinchenko and Luckyj1892, 121). In parallel with his creativity as a poet, Shevchenko’s social activism cemented his image as the “father of the Ukrainian nation” (Plokhy, Reference Plokhy2005, 194). As mentioned in the beginning of the article, he was a member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The goals of the organization were to promote scientific interest in literature and poetry, and to publish a journal for peasants and elementary books. This Society, which consisted of scholars and teachers among others, was considered a cultural organization with a diverging political agenda of establishing social justice (abolition of serfdom), promoting general education, and supporting federal division of the empire. It consisted of Ukrainian intellectuals, mainly poets, linguists, and historians. However, despite ambitious plans, the organization was rather short-lived and operated for only year and a half (Miiakovski Reference Miiakovski and Luckyj1962). The annoyance of Shevchenko over the non-assertiveness of some of his fellow Brotherhood members is illustrated in his poem “My Friendly Epistle,” in which Shevchenko criticized his fellows:

For Shevchenko, the Brotherhood was a platform for muzhik (peasant) politics in a sense of his passionate advocacy for nationalist social thought and Ukrainianism (Finnin Reference Finnin2011), whereas for Chavchavadze the Society was a modernization project aiming to reinvent the nation as a political unity. One must argue that the actual political possibilities in the two periods of the Russian empire might have influenced this divergence. Shevchenko participated in the activities of underground society (Hromada), which was led by the students of the nobility who wore peasant dress and spoke Ukrainian in their attempt to promote Ukrainian culture and enlightenment of the masses (Hrinchenko Reference Hrinchenko and Luckyj1892). In some ways, Hromada emerged as a social movement with an aim of “national self-education” that focused on organizing schools for the peasantry, staging theatrical performances, and also publishing activities on Ukrainian history, culture, and language (Sereda Reference Sereda2014, 169). Shevchenko’s work appeared in an influential but short-lived Ukrainian periodical, Osnova (Foundation, 1861–1862), edited by Vasyl Bilozerskyi, Panteleimon Kulish, and Mykola Kostomarov (Yekelchuk 2007).

In addition to his efforts to modernize Georgian language, Ilia created several literary salons, initiated the first Georgian translation of the Quran, and contributed to the establishment of a Georgian theater. In 1867 he started to publish the newspaper Iveria, arguably one of the most influential newspapers in 19th-century Georgia. Given the international political context of the time, his newspaper portrayed key international affairs thus linking Georgian readers to the international processes happening in Europe. However, perhaps more importantly, Ilia took active part in the activities of the influential Georgian political and cultural newspaper Droeba, which established feuilleton as a distinct genre of correspondence between Georgian intellectuals of the time. An elitist in nature, feuilleton emerged as a form of dialogue between members of the intelligentsia. This form of correspondence allowed simultaneous representation of Georgian regions, which in turn was a mechanism for construction of what Manning succinctly called “Georgians, that is, readers of Droeba” (2012, 81).