The Literature of Georgia

A History

Donald Rayfield

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136825361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The first comprehensive and objective history of the literature of Georgia, revealed to be unique among those of the former Byzantine and Russian empires, both in its quality and its 1500 years' history. It is examined in the context of the extraordinarily diverse influences which affected it - from Greek and Persian to Russian and modern European literature, and the folklore of the Caucasus.

I
THE MAKING OF THE CLASSICAL AGE

THE FIFTH TO THE ELEVENTH CENTURIES: ASCETICISM AND BYZANTIUM

1

Laying the foundations

Before the earliest texts of Georgian literature could appear, three conditions had to be met. First, an alphabet had to be devised for the Georgian language; secondly, texts, above all religious, had to be translated from neighbouring cultures; thirdly, centres — monastic, diocesan and temporal — had to be established, where a new culture could be sustained and propagated over centuries of invasion, conquest and oppression.

The Georgian alphabet was, in the view of most non-Georgian scholars, introduced not long after Byzantine Christianity, in the fourth century AD. The alphabetic order of Georgian, however, seems archaic: it roughly follows that of classical Greek (where the digamma comes sixth), whereas the Armenian, whose sign for v comes thirtieth rather than sixth, follows the Christian Greek order. Nevertheless, like Armenians before them and Slavs after them, the Georgians probably received a package deal:¹ the Byzantine missionaries included, or recruited, very able educated men, linguists to all effects; they drew up an alphabet based — with one exception, namely the Hellenic digraph ou for u — on the modern phonetic principle of ‘one sign equals one sound’. (The digraph for u

soon evolved into the minuscule nuskhuri single letter

.) The alphabet’s forms were influenced by Christian symbolism: this is strongly suggested by the aspirated k (now

then

the initial letter of Christ’s name, having the form of a cross, while the letter for j (now

then

) which was originally the final letter in the Georgian alphabet, combines the cross and Jesus’s initial into a monogram. The Georgian alphabet seems unlikely to have a pre-Christian origin, for the major archaeological monument of the first century AD, the bilingual Armazi gravestone commemorating Serafita, daughter of the Georgian viceroy of Mtskheta, is inscribed in Greek and Aramaic only. It has been believed, and not only in Armenia, that all the Caucasian alphabets — Armenian, Georgian and Caucaso-Albanian — were invented in the fourth century by the Armenian scholar Mesrop Mashtots. Whatever the origin of the Georgian alphabet, this great asomtavruli (

‘capital letter’) script which first appears in AD 430, like the Armenian, which its kutkhovani (

‘angular’) version resembles in design, is monumental, suitable for inscription in stone. Within a few centuries texts were written in a modified minuscule, the nuskhuri

by the eleventh century a handwritten cursive — known as mkhedruli (

‘military’) in contrast to the older khutsuri (

, ‘priestly’) scripts — giving birth to the modern Georgian alphabet forms, which now added superb visual recognition to their linguistic virtues.

The Georgian chronicles The Life of Kartli (

)² assert that a Georgian script was invented two centuries before Christ, an assertion unsupported by archaeology. There is a possibility that the Georgians, like many minor nations of the area, wrote in a foreign language — Persian, Aramaic, or Greek — and translated back as they read.

The translation of texts is the beginning of original literature. Before we embark on a study of written texts, we should briefly survey the centres where they originated. From the fourth century Georgians were sent to monastic colonies in Jerusalem, Antioch and Constantinople. From there, under Arab pressure, they spread to Saint Katherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai, and by the tenth century to Mount Athos. This brought them into contact with most of the nations of the near east and eastern Mediterranean: the resulting waves of translation thus far outweigh in quantity, if not in quality, the original literature that was yet to come. Georgian was not merely a recipient, however, but very often an intermediary, as texts might be translated, through Georgian, from Arabic or Assyrian into Greek or Armenian, in endless permutations, frequently leaving only the Georgian version to survive barbarian or Islamic attack intact. Georgian texts thus illuminate the history of many other oriental Christian literatures that are largely beyond the scope of this book. Some Georgian writers, such as the prince Peter the Iberian (traditionally 409–88), became purely Greek writers. (Peter the Iberian is sometimes identified as the philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagiticus.)

Conversely, missionaries (many of them presumably of Georgian birth) migrated or fled to Georgia and disseminated the texts and doctrines of monastic colonies. The legends of ‘The Thirteen Assyrian Fathers’ of the sixth century, which we shall examine as part of hagiographical literature, presumably reflect an intermittent flow of missionaries for the next 900 years.

The first centres abroad were in Jerusalem, and of these the Palavra and Mar-Saba (483) cloisters were the oldest. In Jerusalem too the oldest Georgian inscription (AD 430) has been found. In the seventh century these centres began to shift, by a process of diffusion, to a group of Georgian monasteries on Mount Sinai, where eighty-five surviving Georgian manuscripts include a mravaltavi (

, literally ‘many chapters’ — a lectionary, or miscellany of Bible texts that were read as part of the liturgy) dated 864. These manuscripts give us an idea of the most archaic Georgian literary language.³ A catalogue of the earliest translations (biblical and liturgical) also survives on Mount Sinai, but, except for a few fragments, these works are lost. A Georgian presence lingered on Mount Sinai until the sixteenth century.

Monasteries within Georgia were recolonized from Jerusalem and survived only precariously if, like Garesja, they were near the turbulent political centres of Mtskheta or Tbilisi. Monks had to flee to the periphery, to Tao-Klarjeti (today around Artvin in north-east Turkey), or to new centres, notably the Romana monastery in Constantinople, built by Basil in 876 to commemorate Hilarion the Iberian. The greatest Georgian centre abroad, however, was the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos. It was founded by the Byzantine general-turned-monk Tornike Eristavi (

) in 983. Here Ekvtime Atoneli (

, also known as Euthymius Hagiorite, 963–1028) translated or adapted into Georgian 160 literary works — biblical, exegetic, hagiographical and liturgical — as well as a number of Greek texts: it is possible that Ekvtime translated the very important Tale of Varlaam and Iosaphat into Greek from a Georgian version. The Georgians endured a stormy century on Athos before their acceptance by the Greeks, and it is the Iviron monastery on Athos that for three centuries replenishes the devastated homeland with learning and propagators. The life of Ekvtime records a request by the Georgian kuropalates (‘prince-regent’) for books to be sent from Athos because of the dearth of literature in Georgia.⁴

In the eleventh century Georgian monks colonized the Black Mountain (an area between Antioch and Seleucia), the Petritsoni monastery (1083) in Bulgaria, and the Holy Cross in Jerusalem (restored 1040–60), which prospered until the fourteenth century. Only Turkish rule strangled these institutions, by interrupting the flow of new recruits.

The greatest cultural stimulus came from the very first texts of Georgian literature. They were composed largely in Palestine and Sinai and were almost entirely translations from the Bible, first the Four Gospels, the Psalms, and then the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Saint Paul. The Life of Kartli asserts that King Parsman gave to the Shio Mghvimeli monastery a Gospel decorated by King Vakhtang. Vakhtang reigned roughly between AD 450 and 500, so that by the fifth century the Gospels may have existed in Georgian. In The Passion of Saint Shushanik (dubiously dated to AD 473) the martyr quotes from Saint Paul, the Psalms, and the Gospels. We know that Georgian monks at Mar-Saba in the sixth century had a liturgy which, except for the Mass, was entirely in Georgian. But our earliest unambiguously dated manuscripts were written much later. We may speculate that the first translations date from the fourth or fifth century, since early palimpsest and other fragments show linguistic archaicism of a provenance earlier than the eighth century. But in our discussion of the Georgian Bible, let us be warned that, in the words of one scholar: ‘To this day it is a mystery and a secret who the first translators of the Bible into Georgian were, what foreign-language versions they were using, or when this gigantic work of political and imperial importance must have been completed … it must have been an entire commission, not just one or two persons, who carried out this task.’⁵

Of the earliest khanmeti translations — assuming that the kh- really indicates the earliest form of the language — little more than fragments of paper and parchment, used for rewriting or for bind...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Map of historical regions of Georgia
• Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Transliteration of the Georgian alphabet
• PART I THE MAKING OF THE CLASSICAL AGE
• PART II THE GOLDEN AGE, THE FALL & THE RESURRECTION
• PART III ROMANTIC & CIVIC LITERATURE
• PART IV THE REDISCOVERY OF ROOTS
• PART V THE AGE OF INTERNATIONALISM
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index