Rhyming the National Spirit: Taras Shevchenko and Ilia Chavchavadze

The paper is a comparative inquiry into the roles of Ilia Chavchavadze (1837-1907) and Taras Shevchenko (1818-1861) as national poets and anti-colonial (anti-Tsarist) intellectuals within the context of their respective national traditions (Georgia and Ukraine). During the period of their activity (19th and the beginning of 20th century) both Ukraine and Georgia were under Tsarist imperial rule, albeit the two poets lived in different periods of Russian empire history. Through their major works, each called on their communities to ‘awaken’ and ‘revolt’ against oppression, rejected social apathy caused by Tsarist subjugation and raised awareness about the historical past of their nations. The non-acceptance of present and belief in an independent future was one of the dominant themes in the poetry and prose of both. Their contemporary importance is illustrated in political discourse both after Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004), and Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003) where both poets are referred “as founding fathers of national ideology”, the history textbooks alluding to them as “symbols of anti-colonial resistance”. To this day, however, there has been surprisingly little academic writing in the West endeavoring to compare the works and activities of the two poets and their impact on national mobilization in Tsarist Ukraine and Georgia, even though their countries are often mentioned in a same breath by commentators on contemporary culture and politics. The paper attempts to fill this gap and tries to understand the relationship between literature and social mobilization in 19th century Russian Empire. By reflecting on Taras Shevchenko’s and Ilia Chavchavadze’s poetry, prose and social activism, I will try to explain how in different periods of Russian imperial history, the two poets helped to develop a modern form of political belonging among their compatriots and stimulated an anti-colonial mobilization with different political outcomes. To theorize on the role of poets and novelists in anti-colonial national movement, I will reflect on the writings of Benedict Anderson (1991), John Hutchinson (1994; 1999), Rory Finnin (2005; 2011) and problematize Miroslav Hroch’s (1996) three phase model of the development of national movements. Overall, the paper would aim to show the importance of, what John Hutchinson called, ‘cultural nationalists’ in understanding contemporary nationalist discourse in Georgian and Ukrainian societies.

A Word. Palaver and Its Transferal Residues

The word 'palaver' is colloquially associated with useless verbiage and the nuisance of a tediously long, aimless and superfluous debate. At the same time, it insinuates an uncivilized culture of discourse beyond reason. Thus it appears to be of vaguely exotic origin but still firmly set in the European lexicon. Yet behind this contemporary meaning there lies a long history of linguistic and cultural transfers which is encased in a context of different usages of language and their intersections. By tracing the usage and semantics of 'palaver' in various encyclopaedias, glossaries and dictionaries of English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, the following article explores the rich history of this word. Moreover, it also regards the travelling semantics of the term 'palaver' as a process of cultural transfer that can be likened to the microcellular workings of a (retro)virus. Viral reproduction and evolution work through processes of transfer that enable the alteration of the host to adjust it to the replication and reproduction of the virus. In some cases, these processes also allow for the mutation or modification of the virus, making it suitable for transfer from one host to another. The virus is thus offered here as a vital model for cultural transfer: It not only encompasses the necessary adoption and adaption of contents or objects of cultural transfer in different contexts. It contributes to a conceptual understanding of the transferal residue that the transferred content is endowed with by its diversifying contexts. This model thereby surpasses an understanding of cultural transfer as literal translation or transmission: it conceptualizes cultural transfer as an agent of evolutionary processes, allowing for mutational effects of transfer as endowment.