‘Renters’ and ‘Real Tbilisians’: Historicizing the Georgian ‘city’ as an ethnolinguistic

category—

H. Paul Manning (Trent U., Ontario, Canada: paulmanning@trentu.ca)

My first experience of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, was in the spring of 1992, a few

short months after the coup that ousted the first post-socialist government of Zviad

Gamsakhurdia. It also leveled much of a historic portion of the downtown area. The

general who had led the coup, Tengiz Kitovani, had been a sculptor in the socialist

period. As a result, the devastated downtown region became known at the time as

‘Kitovani’s exhibition’.

The coup against Gamsakhurdia was transformative in its effects on the Georgian

city not only in the plastic arts, but also socially. The emergent political divide between

Anti- and Pro-Gamsakhurdia orientations often boiled down to the inherited cultural

division between tbiliseli ‘Tbilisian’ and provincial Georgian. The nationalist

Gamsakhurdia government’s support was strongest amongst present or erstwhile

Georgian villagers, whilst old urbanites, and the urban intelligentsia in particular, ranged

themselves against the new government. 1

The 1992 coup was also a family feud within the socialist intelligentsia: A

philologist-dissident-turned-president ousted by a sculptor-turned-general (Kitovani) and

a criminal-turned-writer-turned-warlord (Jaba Ioseliani), the coup illustrated emergent

and opposed tendencies within the socialist intelligentsia. The term intelligentsia (a

collective term, the singulative form is intelligent) denotes a specific social formation

specific to Eastern Europe.2 In many ways, the intelligentsia as a social class fulfills

1 Nana Sumbadze and George Tarkhan-Mouravi (http://www.nispa.sk/news/tarkhan.rtf.)2 In contemporary Georgia ‘new intellectuals’ are distinguished from ‘old intelligentsia’, the former having Western educations, receiving Western grants, and speaking Western liberal discourses of ‘civil society’ and markets, in opposition to the Socialist educations, state funding and nationalist discourses of the intelligentsia (Nodia 2002).

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some of the functions of Western categories of ‘Civil Society’ and the system of

‘professions’ (Nodia 2002, Zurabishvili 2002).3 Unlike ‘Civil Society’, which mediates

between the ‘State’ and the ‘People’ by a essentially Liberal, democratically imagined

open-ended aggregation of voices on the analogy of a market (Taylor 2002), the

intelligentsia is rather imagined as an essentially aristocratic mediator between divided

portions of a bounded social totality (Nodia 2002, Zurabishvili 2002; Mannheim 1993).

The intelligentsia is imagined in an organic relation to some social totality (‘the people’,

‘the nation’) for whom it speaks (hence Gramsci’s term ‘organic intelligentsia’ derives

from this tradition) to the state (Manning 2004 and references there). In effect, whereas

western professions define themselves as technical specialists first and foremost,

deliberating over means to given ends, the prototypical activity of an intelligent is

writing, and formulating moral ends, such as ‘what is to be done’ for the good of the

whole, so that they can be called ‘teleological’ specialists (Nodia 2002, Konrad and

Szelenyi 1979). Hence, under socialism, the intelligentsia acted as both a critical force,

as well as a legitimating force, in relation to the state apparatus (nomenklatura, many of

whom were rather more ‘plebeian’ technical specialists) (Zurabishvili 2002). The

intelligentsia was completely dependent on the state nomenklatura, for the state was the

agency that would provide the means to its ends. But for the intelligentsia to appear to

act as an independent agent, members of the ‘true’ intelligentsia entered into complicated

patronage networks with the ‘nomenklatura’ intelligentsia, who provided the practical

interventions with the state so that the ‘true’ intelligentsia could contemplate their ideal

daydream of a independent nation without the state (Zurabishvili 2002: 48).

In effect, the Gamsakhurdia government was the first government by the

intelligentsia, a government that did not need the socialist intelligentsia because it was

composed itself of intelligentsia (Zurabishvili 2002:52). The 1992 was in effect a coup

by the intelligentsia against the intelligentsia, inasmuch as the Gamsakhurdia government

3 I would like to thank Michael Lambek for inadvertently helping me clarify my thinking on this topic.

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failed to provide its required patronage of the remaining intelligentsia. At the same time,

the coup revealed deep tensions within the cultural ideologies of the intelligentsia. The

primary role of the cultural intelligentsia was to take care of the ‘Nation’ while the State

took care of socialism (as in the phrase ‘National in form, Socialist in content’). Hence

cultural production by the intelligentsia was almost always about ‘The nation’. Culture

was first and foremost a set of national forms, a set of ideologies of ethnolinguistic

identity. But while this intelligentsia liked to view itself as an organic part of the nation

for whom it spoke, it also liked to be separated from this nation residentially (living in

cities as opposed to the countryside) and in terms of privileges recieved from the state as

a rewards for its apparently disinterested formulation of projects of identity, legitimation

and teleology. In effect the intelligentsia were an ‘aristocracy of the soul’, separated

residentially in cities from the ‘people’ for whom they spoke, and separated by their

nomeklatura patrons from the ‘plebeian’ state to whom they spoke (Zurabishvili 2002).

The intelligentsia imagined itself as being in a symbiotic relation to the people in ideal

terms (from which it was separated in practical terms), and in practical terms it existed in

a symbiotic relation to the state (from which it distantiated itself in ideal terms).

The Gamsakhurdia government, in effect, sided with ‘the people’ and neglected

its ‘state Nomenklatura’ role of patronage for the intelligentsia. The Gamsakhurdia

government, like many post-socialist governments, was noted for its somewhat

hyperbolic commitment to a form of Georgian nationalism which owed as much to

Socialist compartmentalization of national cultures as it did to a fairly eclectic, even

mystical, notion of a spiritual mission of the Nation. The Gamsakhurdia government was

a high water mark for the political fortunes of a puristic conservative utopia of Georgian

cultural nationalism, what Zurabishvili calls a ‘mythopoetic’ nationalism, which

attempted to put the received collective daydream of a ethnolinguistic category of the

nation into practice:

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The principal axis of Georgian mythopoetic nationalism was ‘Georgianness’

(kartveloba), or the belief in the exclusiveness and uniquess of the Georgian

ethnos. In this context ‘ethnic purity’ held an important place; if ‘classical

nationalism’ is flexible towards the assimilation of ethnic minorities, among us by

the motive of ‘the preservation of Georgianness’ depended on the negation of the

Georgianizing of other ethnic groups. (Zurabishvili 2002: 50)

However, the ‘revolt’ of the intelligentsia against Gamsakhurdia was not an

ideological revolt, but rather a revolt on a different level. On the one hand,

Gamsakhurdia’s supporters were in fact primarily provincials rather than urbanites, but

perhaps more importantly, the new ‘intelligentsia state’ abrogated the tradition patronage

relations between nomenklatura and intelligentsia:

Mythopoetic nationalism gave birth to the phenomenon of Zviad Gamsakhurdia....

This was a man who tried to realize in practice the ideology of the intelligentsia --

mythopoetic nationalism.... What resulted, we all know well. It’s worth noting,

that the opposition of the greatest portion of the Georgian intelligentsia with

Gamsakhurdia was not provoked by the first president’s ideology. Simply,

Gamsakhurdia rudely abrogated the existing harmony within a united, symbiotic

system—he befriended some of them and brought them (or left them) in the

nomeklatura. most, however, he declared the enemies of the Nation and criminals.

(Zurabishvili 2002: 52)

Opposed to this narrow and homogenizing notion of Georgianness as imagined

in Georgian ‘mythopoetic’ nationalism is the identity category of Tbilisian, a category of

urban identity which implies no set ethnicity. Tbilisians are no more necessarily

‘Georgian’ than Georgians are necessarily Tbilisians. However, insofar as Georgians

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were primarily peasants, and intelligentsia primarily Tbilisians, the Tbilisi intelligentsia

can be seen as torn between the ideal puristic ethnolinguistic identity in whose name they

spoke and the real privileges of their urban life which kept them separate from the nation

for whom they spoke.

The 1992 coup brought to the fore this problematic relationship between two

emergent forms of modern identity in Georgia, ‘Georgian’ and ‘Tbilisian’, the former

based on a puristic folklorized notion of ethnicity, imagined as a linguistic community of

Georgian speakers, rooted in the Georgian countryside, as opposed to Armenians,

Russians, Tatars, and so on. The latter Tbilisian identity is a more eclectic one, based

empirically on urban residence, a polyglot urban speech community which has no set

relation to Georgian ethnolinguistic identity, but is opposed to ‘villager’ identity.

Georgianness is an essentializing intensionalization of ethnolinguistic identity,

Tbilisiannness based on the extensional facts of urban residence, the former a kind of

puristic allegiance to a linguistic code, the latter an eclectic allegiance to a linguistic

repertoire. Indeed, historically, Tbilisi is only problematically a Georgian city, Georgians

having been an ethnic minority within this city until the twentieth century. I am here

interested in the anxieties produced by the incommensurability of these two forms of

identity that were forged, delineated and rooted under socialism, but which, under

capitalist conditions, this relationship of incommensurability between ethnolinguistic

identities of Georgianness and residential identities of Tbilisianess have come home to

roost in the city. This paper is concerned with outlining the anxieties faced by different

groups of arriving Georgians in finding themselves at home in ‘their city’

There is no better unintentional illustration of the problematic relationship

between Georgianness and the city than the Georgian ethnographic museum, which

confronts the actual lived space and habitations of the modern city with the traditional

Georgian life of the rural village. The museum, located on a hillside above the city,

consists of a ‘village’ street along which are arranged typical (and authentic) houses from

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different Georgian villages, the village is a ‘metavillage’ consisting of houses from all the

different kinds of villages in Georgia. In the museum, Georgia is represented as a

diagrammatic icon represented by houses from each region, laid out spatially both as a

village and as a map of Georgia’s village regions. The operation of typifying

Georgianness as a set of categories of identity rooted in villages is built up from

typifications of having each type of house represent a type of Georgian (typical Rachan

houses, Mingrelian Houses, Kakhetian houses). Moreover, the houses are laid out on the

hillside as if a ‘map’, a diagrammatic icon, of Georgia: The Svan tower representing

highland Georgia is located highest on the hillside, for example. Georgia is represented

as a diagrammatic icon consisting of regions of Georgia represented by houses from each

region. In effect, the museum is a semiotic amalgam of two central technologies of

nationalist imagining, the map and the museum (Anderson 1991). There are gaps and

erasures, of course, most important being the absence of the city of Tbilisi and its

architecture from this map/museum of Georgia. Ironically, then, for the ‘map’ of

traditional village Georgia faces the modern Georgian city itself; from the prestigious

neighborhood of Vake (once the home of the Socialist elite caste, the intelligentsia, now

the home of elites based on wealth) one can see this ‘metavillage’ in a glance, and from

the ‘metavillage’ one can see much of Tbilisi. In eliding the city from this representation

of the Georgian totality as being a peasant village writ large, the builders of this model

and the larger imaginary it condenses, the Socialist intelligentsia, render their own

position as ideal viewer invisible. For their own real homes are located just at the base of

the hill, in the city, able to view the ideal homes of the Georgian peasant peasant village

from their balconies.

1. The Georgian ethnographic museum seen from the city

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2. The city seen from the museum

Socialist projects for post-socialist identity: Passports, Nationality, Residence.

The broader contrast between the museum of rural life and modern city life is an

unresolved contradiction, producing a larger model of Georgianness that stands in simple

opposition to the city to which it is displayed. The representation or urban versus rural

as an unmediated opposition captures an important, if perhaps unintended, truth not only

about the problematic nature of the relation between the Georgian countryside and the

identity of the city. Under socialism, this imagined opposition was partially constituted

reinforced, and regulated by the state by a number of other semiotic technologies that,

unlike the museum, circulated with, or regulated the circulation of, socialist citizens.

Since the early 1930s rural populations were indeed ‘rooted’ in their villages by the

system of internal passports and regulation of urban populations by residence permits,

just as nationalities were ‘rooted’ in national republics and regions, with privileged

access to resources, jobs, education, promotions, often given to titular nationalities via an

official policy of ‘taking root’ (korenizatsiia) or indigenization of elites (Slezkine 1996

passim). The internal passport system (introduced for urban populations in 1932,

extended to rural populations under Krushchev in the 1950s), then, created and regulated

essentialized categories both of nationality (passports required to list the official

nationality of the bearer, abolished in Georgia) as well as residence (the propiska or

residence permit that regulated right to reside in a specific urban district, residence

having many entailments for access to rights and privileges to socialist services,

including limited rights of inheritance (Dragadze 1988:33).4 The only difference was

that the propiska could be changed, one’s nationality could not. But until the 1950s,

residence was almost as essentialized a distinction as nationality: having a passport (and

hence ability to move) at all was a privilege granted urbanites and denied villagers. The

propiska system (abolished in 1996 in Georgia) was introduced in the first place for 4 Susan Brazier http://www.nelegal.net/articles/propiska.htm; http://www.nelegal.net/articles/oldpropiska.htm

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urban locations to prevent massive immigrations into urban space, and to keep rural

populations rooted in villages as socialist serfs. If the contents of the passport

(nationality, propiska) were categories of ‘rootedness’, having a passport at all was a

precondition to mobility: rural dwellers were twice-rooted, on the one hand, the propiska

in the internal passport was introduced to regulate urban residence, on the other, rural

dwellers were not given passports at all for quite some time, rendering them unable to

move at all. 5

INSERT (Socialist Internal Passport: categories of identity)

These categories regulating the essentialized provenance and movements of

categories of persons were at the same time the categories that regulated the production

and circulation of categories of things, socialist commodities: technocratic planning

under socialism, a ‘dictatorship over needs’(Feher et al 1983; Verdery 1996: 26-29), had

as its presuppositions to some extent typified categories of consumption, imputed

‘needs’, in some cases ‘national’, in other cases distinguishing and reinforcing the

assumed needs of ‘villages’ and ‘cities’. Such spatialized categories of distribution were

the teleologies of technocratic planning, and became ever more visible when, as often

happened, goods ended up in the wrong place:

(Cartoon)

5 See Tova Höjdestrand ‘The Soviet-Russian production of homelessness: Propiska, housing, privatisation’ (2004, http://www.anthrobase.com/txt/H/Hoejdestrand_T_01.htm); ‘The Institution of the Propiska (Residence Registration) and its Evolution’, Svetlana Gannushkina (2004, http://refugees.memo.ru/For_All/RUPOR.NSF/0/210846301ae745efc3256da100762cb3?OpenDocument; (Revaz Gachechiladze, ‘Population Migration in Georgia and Its Socio-Economic Consequences". Discussion Paper Series - UNDP, 1997 (http://www.ceroi.net/reports/tbilisi/issues/population_and_social_conditions/impact.htm). In Russia the propiska category has not been fully abolished in practice and has been revalorized as a way of producing ethnic distinction against non-Russian (often Caucasian) ethnicities, dubbed ‘blacks’, by proxy (Vladimir Malakhov 2003, ‘Racism and Migrants’, http://www.eurozine.com/article/2003-03-14-malakhov-en.html )

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What was true of persons and (moveable) goods was equally true of the physical

infrastructure: socialist planning produced a clear and unambiguous distinction between

urban and rural areas, with no ‘in between’ categories of ‘suburbs’. Nor was there any

interest in the general population in having such a category, given the importance of

urban residence permits and locality in having access to goods and services (Lovell 2003:

209-10). What was true of Russian socialist planning was even more true of Georgian

socialist practice, where the Russian phenomenon of dachas (ex-urban cottages) was only

weakly developed, the relative proximity of natal villages in Georgia serving many of the

same functions that dachas provided for Russian city-dwellers (on which see Lovell

2003). From the nineteenth century onwards, Georgian city-dwellers have often moved

back and forth between city and village on a yearly transhumant basis, working in the city

and ‘resting’ in ‘the village’ during the heat of the Tbilisi summer.

The net effect was that socialism reinforced and reproduced the residential

opposition between countryside and city, the very distinction that was to be effaced under

communism, in much the same way as it regulated and reinforced essentialized

distinctions of official nationality between titular nationalities of each republic

(Georgians) and ‘others’ whose national ‘home’ was elsewhere (Armenians, Russians,

Tatars) (Suny 1998: 284-290), another distinction that was sometimes expected to ‘wither

away’ in the communist future.

‘Cultured’ urban comportment and spectacle: goimoba, mariazhoba, kultura

With the fall of socialism, this division between villager and urbanite is no longer

regulated by the state, as residence has become regulated by private property relations

and a market in land. This has produced two major changes in the city, both of which

relate to the way that city life is no longer subject to the hegemony of cultured norms of

socialist consumption, k’ult’ura, but instead of uncultured displays of villager behavior,

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goimoba, or superficial displays of theatricalized conspicuous consumption, mariazhoba.6

On the one hand, the post-socialist period has witnessed an unprecedented rural

immigration into the city. On the one hand, the post-socialist period has witnessed an

unprecedented rural immigration into the city, as erstwhile villagers abandon the defunct

rural economy for the city, and, at the same time, erstwhile city-dwellers flee the defunct

national economy as guest-workers abroad. Some villages, indeed, have more or less lost

their entire populations, just as some city neighborhoods are now populated primarily by

recent ex-villagers. ‘Real’ Tbilisians, many of whom themselves have genealogies in the

city that are no more than 2-3 generations deep, find themselves faced by a horde of

socially alien Georgian villagers, who bring with them behaviors once statically

associated with village life. This is true even for those many urban Georgians who

engaged in a transhumant lifestyle, begun by the Georgian gentry in the nineteenth

century, of summering in their natal village. The status distinction and corresponding

behavioral distinctions between villagers and city-dwellers under socialism was, for such

cyclically urban-rural Georgians converted into a stylistic distinction, with behaviors

acceptable in the village strongly sanctioned in the city. Thus, a child who yells loudly or

otherwise engages in impolite behavior might be reprimanded with a remark like ‘What,

do you think you are in the village?’, or, equivalently, one might be called a ‘villager’.

With the influx of culturally unassimilated villagers into the urban core, particularly large

numbers of refugees from Abkhazia who now more or less permanently reside in all the

available socialist period hotels, the complaint is that ‘Tbilisi has become a big village’.

At the same time, erstwhile urban populations, particularly ethnic Russians and other old

6 Bregadze’s dictionary of Georgian Slang (200: 84) gives mariazhoba as tavmomts’oneoba, p’ranch’va [affectation, clowning], qoqochoba [swaggering, pretension, conceit]. The term is borrowed from French through Russian, but has a very different meaning In Georgian slang from Russian slang. A friend of mine defines "mariazhi" (n. used of a human) as a hybrid of ‘snob’ or ‘snobbish’ and ‘non-entity’ (siafandi).. Another friend chose to define the term ostensively: “Now ‘Mariazhi’ Yes! They are horrible. [A Mariazhi] could be Tbilisian or Non-Tbilisian. These are people who are obsessed with showing off their wealth. Often they buy a car each month, and of course it must be a foreign brand; or they want to have the best cell phone they could possibly ever have, they have to live in the center [sc. of the city] and talk in public about how good, wealthy etc. they are.”

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Tbilisian populations, have left Tbilisi en masse, leaving streets and neighborhoods once

regarded as having a distinctively urban culture now populated with rural strangers to the

city. When I asked one friend about the distinction between villager and Tbilisian

behavior, he ruefully explained, ‘the problem is, there no longer is a distinction.’ A wide

range of behaviors, linguistic and other semiotic phenomena characteristic of Tbilisi

today are one and all categorized as ‘villager’ behavior (goimoba): ranging from wearing

nikes with a formal suit, not knowing how to eat at the table, to parking one’s car halfway

across the street. Goimoba implies homologies across a wide range of semiotic behaviors,

a broadband broadcast of unculturedness. Strangely, the equally novel phenomenon of

keeping of farm animals in urban space is not universally categorized as ‘villager’, linked

instead to economic changes that have forced many to retreat to subsistence strategies.

The various derogative terms for villagers each draw attention to a lack of knowledge of

cultured comportment. The lack of culture is at the center of the term goimi, ‘hick’,

Bregadze’s slang lexicon (200:46) gives goimi as ‘backwards, uneducated’, similar to an

almost equivalent term for villager, gorsala (which shades into ‘uncultured but with

pretenses’, moving towards mariazhi) meaning ‘uncultured, ignorant and at the same time

pretentious person.’ Other synonyms for goimi involve metaphors involving horned

creatures: rkiani (‘horned one’, lack of culture with connotations of unreasonable

aggressiveness), kaji (‘[usually horned] devil’, defined as ‘an aggressive goimi’ by a

friend) and jixvi (ibex, mountain goat).

Goimoba is first and foremost marked by a lack of kultura, something it shares in

common with the culture of the new elites in the city. The old city culture of the socialist

intelligentsia was governed by a commitment to a concept of kultura, classicizing cultural

canons fostered under Stalinism, semiotic displays related to consumption and behavior

that focussed on maintaining both cultured interiorities (appreciation of national classics)

and exteriorities (civilized public comportment and private consumption). Culturedness

had as much to do with memorizing Georgian classics as with bodily hygeine, labor

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efficiency, and maintaining a cultured home with white tablecloths, decorative

lampshades and curtains (Dunham 1976, Kelly and Volkov 1998, Fitzpatrick 1992: 216-

256; 1999: 79-83). The new city culture, at least for new elites and their imitators, is by

contrast one of superficial theatricalized display of consumption, mariazhoba, as visible

in the investment of Georgians in visible forms of consumer display, restaurants on the

main street whose expansive windows allow elite consumption to be rendered visible and

displayed amidst poverty, expensive clothes and foreign automobiles, as well as new

forms of domicile whose dominant principle is not only exterior display but ‘quantity of

style’ (Oushakine REF. Also Humphrey 2002, Lovell 2003). Mariazhoba implies

theatricalized displays of wealth, implying exteriorized consumption without interior

kultura, as well as excess beyond the norms of kultura, but also the subterfuge of putting

on a public show of wealth when private means are lacking. If Goimoba is behavior out

of place, unstudied villager behavior on the city stage, Mariazhoba can only be at home

in the theatricalized space of the city, in which each stranger is at once both spectator and

spectacle.

Categories of population and culture regulated and kept distinct by the socialist

political economy have imploded, an empty countryside and a city that exhibits the lack

of ‘culture’ that characterizes the village. The uncultured villagers have no only

displaced the cultural canons of taste that characterized urban intelligentsia and workers,

but for many of the new villagers, their new models of emulation and prestige does not

follow this existing cultural hierarchy, but those of the new capitalist elites.

On the other hand, the advent of a capitalist political economic market, property

relations, and the resulting alienability of residences as property, has created

unprecedented mobility of populations both between urban neighborhoods and between

the country and the city. New social distinctions and new categories of persons based on

wealth and property have emerged, distinctions between ‘owners’ and ‘renters’ that are

the locus of some of the most discussed and fraught relations, as well as new categories

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of persons, the so-called ‘new Georgians’ with the capacity, based on newly acquired

wealth and despotic rights of ownership over personal property, not only to own urban

space but also to change it in new ways. Since ownership of property in residences was

by and large transferred to the residents at the end of socialism, city-dwellers, real

Tbilisians, by and large are net owners of real-estate property, and newly arriving

villagers are net renters, so relations between villager and city-dweller are at the same

time cast into a new political economic mold of conflict between renters and owners, a

conflict only problematically regulated by the state, since economic ownership

presupposes a state structure able to constitute, regulate and enforce it, and stories abound

of renters who have co-opted owners by bribery, or renters that could only be evicted by

private use of force.

If Tbilisian ‘owners’ find the hordes of villager ‘renters’ to be problematic, they

also find the new category of owner, the ‘New Georgian’, that is, new wealthy elites

emergent under capitalism, to be equally so, having some of the same properties. The

villagers can transform the social and semiotic landscape of the city only morally, by

importing country ways into city life, goimoba, but these new Georgians can transform

the city-scape materially, with their monstrous new homes decked out with the latest

eclectic mixture of styles, sometimes called ‘Tbilisi Post-Modern’, post-modern

skyscraper townhouses rising up behind their imposing ‘Neo-Feudal’ defensive walls,

like some sort of post-modern version of a Norman moat-and-bailey fortress. The new

architecture of Tbilisi, both its focus on exteriorized display of wealth and quantitative

style, post-modernism as the architectural equivalent of hypercorrection, mariazhoba, as

well as its architectural embodiment of the rigid separation, atomization, of social

relations stand in contrast to respectively to classicizing norms of kultura and the

traditional cityscape as well as to the normative ‘openness’ of the courtyard based

communality of Old Tbilisi, in different ways expresses the changing values of the new

elites versus those of the old city dwellers.

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Both groups represent, for Tbilisians, different aspects of a broader problem of

the future of Tbilisi, with different domains of semiotic displays that each in their way

threaten the urban landscape, one by their villager-like way of being in and appropriating

the material surrounds of the city, the other by their frighteningly unconstrained ability to

destroy and transform this urban space materially, remaking prestigious neighborhoods in

their own image, one house at a time. Both groups also share their lack of commitment

to continuing and reproducing the cultural canons of taste that once characterized urban

culture, displacing the once uncontested hegemony of the kultura of the urban

intelligentsia with either a wholesale importation of uncultured Georgian village ways

into the city, goimoba, or a superficial outward display of consumption without cultured

taste, mariazhoba.

At the same time, many see a connection between the lack of culture of the

incoming villagers and the lack of culture of the new elites. Friends of mine would

frequently berate the erstwhile president of Georgia, Shevardnadze, like many members

of the nomenklatura intelligentsia promoted under Brezhnev drawn from technical

specialist elites educated in the provinces, as being a ‘typical village kaji’ [horned devil,

i.e. hick, see above], or refer to buildings of the ‘Tbilisi post-modern’ variety as modern-

kajuri st’ili (Modern-hick style). The category of ‘citizen’ (mokalake, city-dweller) is

represented etymologically as a moral category, not merely the empirical fact of being in

the city, but as a category of moral behavior, a way of being in the city:

In Old Georgian mokalakeoba (citizenness, citydwellerness) also had the meaning

of ‘public work, being a public worker, conduct’....Our ancestors considered

citizenness to be a moral category. To this extent, citizenness is not defined by

being in the city, by duration of dwelling within its boundaries, not even by living

there over many generations, or by the ownership of immobile and mobile

property. (Abrahamishvili and Bolkvadze 2003: 29

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Such a definition in terms of active engagement, ‘public work’, tends to make the

intelligentsia the true ‘citizens’ of the city, regardless of duration of life in the city, or

ownership of property in the city (both old Armenian mokalakeebi under Tsarism, when

the category was a term involving property ownership, as well as ‘New Georgians’).

Such a ‘moral’ definition of the term also is opposed to those who lack the moral

commitment to reproducing the norms and culture of the city, notably village kajebi

‘horned devils; hicks’ as well as new Georgians. Abandoning such ‘civic’ commitment

by the citydwellers leaves the city up’at’rono ‘abandoned’, in the sense of either ‘without

an owner’ and ‘without a patron’, and reworking an Georgian proverb that abandoned

churches become the home of devils (eshmakebi), so too the abandoned city becomes the

home of kajebi (‘horned devils; hicks’):

And, if citizens (in this term’s non political meaning) are not equipped with a

morality fitting the rules and order of city life and a desire for good works for the

city, as the Georgian proverb puts it, if devils (eshmak’ebi) take over

(ep’at’ronebian ‘become a patron to’) an abandoned (up’at’rono ‘having no

patron’) church, an abandoned (upatrono ‘without a patron’) city becomes the

property of kajebi (lit. ‘horned devils’, also ‘hicks’) (Abrahamishvili and

Bolkvadze 2003: 29)

Strangers at home: Georgians in Tbilisi

But in all of these oppositions characterizing the city the category of Georgianness

cannot find itself at home. After all, the category Tbiliseli is indifferent to ethnicity, a

Tbiliseli could be ethnically Georgian, Azeri Tatar, Jewish, Armenian, Russian, and so

on. Even the most died-in-the-wool nationalist author, Ilia Chavchavadze, who

pioneered the essentialized ethnolinguistic identity of Georgianness later canonized under

15

socialism, and had little use for Armenians even on the best of days (Manning 2004), at

least when rhapsodizing about village life, employed an entirely different,

incommensurable, and rather generous, logic of inclusion when faced with his urban

home ‘Tbilisi is our parent city. Everyone one of us who was born here, who lives here,

who goes around (turns) here, whatever ethnicity a man may be, are its children’ (cited

in Tevsadze 2003:). It is as if as one crossed from the countryside to the city, there was a

complete reordering of epistemological stance from an ‘ethnic’ discourse of bounded

totalities united by timeless ‘conspatiality’ to a ‘civic’ one of aggregated masses united

by contemporaneity.7 The intelligentsia extolled publically a notion of timeless ethnic

identity rooted in villages, a discourse of ‘conspatiality’, where regional differences form

orderly national wholes, represented in the Georgian museum. Yet the intelligentsia saw

themselves since the nineteenth century as being fundamentally constituted by relations

of urban consociability and textually-mediated contemporaneity. As the ‘intelligentsia’

developed out of urban gentry ‘society’ (sazogadoeba), this term moved from one

denoting a group of others known from lineage and courtly sociability to one denoting

educated society, relations between strangers mediated by ‘cultures of circulation’,

persons, texts, correspondence, trips to the village, living in the city, an ‘endless stream

of men and moving things’ (Wordsworth), in which the city is merely the experienceable

consociate microcosm of an imagined macrocosm of contempories.8 In this sense

(educated) ‘society’ became in the same breath a ‘public’ (publik’a), both of these

distinguished from the peasantry, who were neither members of society nor a public. The

intelligentsia spoke for, but did not address, a ‘people’ who were not yet a public

(Manning 2004), an urban culture of circulation who defined themselves in a

7 The opposition here between Romantic imaginaries of bounded social totalities and Liberal imaginaries of unbounded social aggregates, with respective logics of ‘conspatiality’ versus ‘contemporaneity’, is sensitively explored in Mannheim (1993 [1953]). The Romantic locus classicus of a complete epistemic shift between the city as an ungraspable Hegelian ‘bad infinity’ in which strangers confront one another as spectator and spectacle, compared to the country as a graspable bounded totality is the transition between Chapters 7 and 8 of Wordsworth’s Prelude.8 Orbeliani’s definition of ‘society’ in his conspectus for a description of Georgia is essentially a list of noble surnames (299).

16

complementary relation to a rural culture of rootedness, the former imagined as an

infinite aggregation of circulating texts and persons just as the latter is imagined as a

bounded immobile totality. This seems to be not so troublesome when these two

incommensurable logics are kept apart, Georgianness pristine and rooted in the villages,

Tbilisianness in the city, but their mixture, specifically when ‘villagerness’ enters the city

on the backs of ‘Georgianness’, that causes alarm.

After all, ethnic Georgians had been a minority in the city until the early 1920s,

only achieving an absolute majority in 1975 (Suny 1988: 299). In the nineteenth century

Tbilisi was far and away the most populous of Georgian cities, but its population was

ethnically primarily non-Georgian (and specifically Armenian), although the dominant

language in Tbilisi was Georgian (Wagner 1856:143). According to Wagner (ibid.) the

population at his time of writing was generally given as three fifths Armenian, but

(Georgian) ‘nobles constitute a tenth of the whole population’. The Georgian nobility,

therefore, was the first group of Georgian to enter the city in large numbers, and as this

urban nobility entered Russian service, they slowly became an urban intelligentsia in the

late Tsarist period, so that the Georgians of the city were largely aristocracy, and later,

intelligentsia, just as Georgians of the village were peasants.

While the language of the city is today predominantly Georgian, many Tbilisians of

take pride in multilingualism, the language of the city has always been ‘mixed’

(Grishashvili), regardless of whether it was mixed with Persian and Armenian, as of old,

or Russian and Turkish. City poets (ashughi) like Sayat Nova, who is nowadays claimed

by Armenians, Georgians and Azeris as ‘their’ national poet, wrote in all three languages,

sometimes using Georgian script for Armenian compositions, or Armenian for Azeri

(Grishashvili 1963 [1914-18]; 96); sometimes, as a display of urbane virtuosity, he would

compose quadrilingual poems, each line in a different language (Grishashvili 1963 [1914-

1918];91-4): (translate and insert example)

17

This kind of multilinguistic play that parallels their virtuousity at the genre of

Majama (double entendre, where scansion makes the same syllabic sequence in rhyming

lines (or sometimes, simultaneously (Woolard)) have different meanings) (Grishashvili

1963 [1914-18]: 103-4). This majama belongs to the Georgian noble Aleksandre

Ch’avch’avadze:

vic’q’o c’era majamit Let me begin to write with a majama,

damshvres chemi maja mit They dried me with my pulse,

ghebav nekt’aris nacvlad, You paint instead of with nectar,

masvi ghvino ma jamit! Pour me wine with that bowl!

Meeting a Persian ashughi poet who asked him if he knew where the Tbilisian

ashughi Sayat-Nova could be found, Sayat Nova replied in Azeri in three words: ‘bil-

manam! gior-manam! tan-manam!’ which, according to Grishashvili (1963:14), is a

bivalent response, in Azeri meaning either ‘Do you understand—It is I! Look at me—It

is I! Meet me—It is I!’ or ‘I don’t know! I haven’t seen him! I don’t know him!’.

And since the endless tide of villagers entering the city are predominantly ethnic

Georgians, it might even be said that in some ways the term Tbiliseli is even opposed to

Georgianness. The urban troubador and apologist for urban folklore, the poet

Grishashvili, used to say that ‘Tbilisians’ were a nation apart from Georgians, for a

Tbilisian nationality had no meaning. As a result, the influx of villagers into the city can

be seen as having ‘Georgianized’ Tbilisi, extinguishing its ‘Cityness’, turning the city

into a ‘big village’. And yet even Grishashvili, the apologete of the irreducibility of city

life to mere ethnicity, who found his figure of citiness not in an ethnic category but rather

in a class based one (the guild worker, qarachogheli), still attempts to reconcile the two

discourses:

18

The Tbilisian (tbileli)—whether he is a kinto (peddler) or an ashughi, a grocer or

a merchant – does not belong to any given tribe (t’omi): he has an Armenian

mother, but his father a Georgian, sometimes the opposite....[In] the real Tbilisian,

...the blood of every nation is commingled... He is everything (international), but

that the same moment we must remember, that Tbilisian inhabitants, who were

created and ‘had their umbilical cord cut’ in Tbilisi— principally are Georgians

by life, language, soul, heart and traditions! (Grishashvili 1963 [1914-1918]:57-

8)

Today, these incommensurable discourses confront each other on the ground of

political economy. The clash of emergent and changing categories of political economy and

inherited socialist categories of essentialized ethnolinguistic identity seems to imply, then,

that Georgians, stipulatively the ethnic ‘owners’ of Tbilisi in terms of nationalist discourse,

are often only temporary ‘renters’ of their urban space in terms of political economy. This

came to the fore in my fieldwork when I was conversing with some acquaintance of mine

in a house off a typical ‘Tbilisi courtyard’ in fabled Old Tbilisi’s Silver Street. At some

point in the conversation the woman, increasingly becoming involved in the ‘city’ thematic

of our conversation, became enraged that she, as a provincial ethnic Georgian, was

considered to be a ‘mdgmuri’ (renter) in Tbilisi. ‘This is our city, the capital of Georgia,

and I am Georgian, how can a Tatar or an Armenian call me a ‘renter’’? Rhapsodizing then

on the organic, inalienable, transhistorical relation between Georgians as subjects and their

national space in essentialized terms of nationalist discourse, she could not reconcile this

inalienable connection between ethnicities and spaces of the nationalist discourse and the

fact of the highly contingent and alienated relation that she, as a renter, had to the same

territory in political economic terms.9

9 Echoing here a complaint made by Georgian nationalist Ilia Ch’avch’avadze over 100 years earlier that the term mamuli (‘fatherland’) meant for Georgians of his day not Georgia as a whole but simply their parental estate, not national territory but immobile property (Ch’avch’avadze 1977 [1866-1876]: 68).

19

How then did Georgians, entering the city physically, come to find a home for

themselves in the city culturally? The first Georgians to ‘colonize’ Tbilisi in large

numbers were in fact members of the aristocracy, entering Russian service and court

society, this aristocratic, and urban, ‘society’ would later give rise to an equally urban

Tsarist, and later socialist, intelligentsia. From the 1860s, the intelligentsia constituted

themselves by writing, and the proper object of writing increasingly became ‘the people’

or ‘the folk’: aristocratic service to the state became for intelligentsia service to the

people. At the same time, intelligentsia discourse was increasingly characterized by its

reflexivity, by writing about writing, by criticism (k’ri’tik’a) (Ch’avch’avadze 1977:

134) : where the object of discourse (writing) is always a social totality, it follows that

criticism of writing becomes in the same moment social criticism. Typically, for such an

urbanizing aristocracy-intelligentsia, the metadiscourse of ‘Georgianness’ and

‘Tbilisianness’ has historically been expressed as a metapragmatic discourse located in

and about poetry, the most salient genre in which these categories can be grasped.

Disemic figures of the city and country

Ironically, these two opposed discourses, this ‘disemia’ (Herzfeld 1997) between the

unabashedly ethnololinguistic discourse of Georgianness rooted in village life and the

bohemian discourse of Old Tbilisi, were both bequeathed posterity by the process of

urbanization of the rural Georgian gentry in the Nineteenth century. The problems faced

by the first generation of urbanizing Georgian gentry (the generation of the 1840s, or

‘Fathers’) was how to find themselves ‘at home’ in the city, while the second generation,

the generation of the 1860s, or ‘sons’, also terg-daleulebi (‘Terek-Drinkers’), already

largely born and bred urbanites, faced instead the problem of creating new relations with

their erstwhile villages in the wake of Emancipation of the Serfs of the 1860s (1864 for

Georgia).

The generation of the 1840’s (and particularly the upper nobility) was among the

20

first generation of primarily urban Georgian gentry. As this generation of nobility

entered Russian service, their lives came to revolve increasingly around the courtly

sociability of the Viceroy’s court in Tbilisi rather than their paternal estates. (Suny 1988:

69-70). This transition from agrarian life to urban life was also a social transformation of

the gentry from a landowning class dependent on serfs to a ‘service nobility’ dependent

on the Russian state, and involved the acquisition of European education and the adoption

of Europeanized dress and manners (Suny 1988: 74). In poetry, Georgian gentry

romantics modeled their poetry both in form and content on Russian romantics, including

in their repertoire translations and adaptations of Russian romantics, as they attempted to

write themselves into the imperial narrative (Ram and Shatirishvili 2004). Howevever

ambivalently, these nobles marked their emergence as a relatively privileged, coopted

colonial elite under Russian rule by adopting both the dress, manners and poetic ‘voice’

of the Russians in public (courtly) life.

But even as they entered city life in Russian service, Georgian nobles also

attempted to find a private home, and a voice, for themselves in the city. This generation

of Georgian romantics found much to their liking in urban culture, they were untroubled

by its ‘Asiatic’ eclecticism in aesthetics, its Armenian, Persian and Turkish cultural and

architectural elements.10 Indeed, to the contrary, if entering Russian service implied a

certain europeanization of dress, manners, and poesy in public (courtly) life, these nobles

often embraced the asiatic elements of the city elsewhere in their lives, particularly in

their poetic production. They expressed their ambivalent colonial position linguistically

by constituting a diglossic repertoire of the poetic voices of others, European and Asiatic.

Gentry poets like Grigol Orbeliani (1804-1883) found a surrogate urban (and asiatic)

voice in the happy-go-lucky figures of the Tbilisi k’int’os (street peddlers) and

qarachoghelis (craft guildsmen) and adopted the genres and thematics of city poetry, like

the mukhambazi for their urban cycles of poetry. The kinto and genres of city poetry like

10 Grigol Orbeliani, ‘Georgia of my time’

21

the mukhambazi appealed to the Georgian gentry because the moral properties of the

kinto (generosity and a happy-go-lucky orientation to bohemian consumption) gave these

characters of the city a superficial resemblence to the values held by the Georgian

aristocracy themselves.

The ‘city poetry’ of later urban poets from among the nobility, such as princess

Nino Orbeliani and other nobles like I. Andronikashvili celebrates the kinto for his

gentility and generosity, displayed at a traditional feast (supra):

am p’urs, am q’vels, gazaurobit ghvinosa, This bread, this cheese, wine

am chem supras alals, usircxvilosa This my honest, unashamed supra[feast],

vinc mec’veva, piandazed gavushli For whoever is with me, I spread on a cloth

....

me ara makvs, arca vt’iri pulzeda, I do not have, nor do I cry about, money,

misebr dardi ar mac’veba gulzeda. Such concerns do not trouble my heart

(‘k’int’o’, Princess Nino Orbeliani 1884)

me sul vlotob, ristvis minda koneba? All I do is get drunk, what do I need wealth for?

(Song of the Kinto, I. Andronikashvili)

Adopting the asiatic voice and values of the kinto, on the one hand, serves to

stylistically distinguish the Georgian gentry poet from the Russian milieu of Court

sociability. The kinto, moreover, as a petty and impoverished trader, stood in as an

indigenous alter ego in contrast to the Armenian merchants, who as property holders

held greater power within the city duma and formed an elite whose interests and values

stood in contrast to those of the Georgian gentry (Shaqulashvili 1987: 45ff).

The specific genre of city poetry, the mukhambazi, associated with the figure of

the kinto and city life, celebrated bohemian values of consumption and feasting, since it

was a genre that was grounded in traditional feasting and drinking rituals not only as a

22

context for performance, but also as its primary theme. The mukhambazis of Prince

Grigol Orbeliani (many of which were written in a mood of pining and nostalgia during

his long exile in Russian service from 1833-1858) index aspects of this ritual

performance, referring to the typical location in Tbilisi for an outdoor supra (Ortachala

gardens), its typical mood (happy-go-lucky celebration), the ritual toastmaster

(tolu(m)bashi), the outcome of too much drink (fist fights), and so on.

ortach’alis baghshi mnaxe, vina var, In the gardens of Ortachala see me, who I am,11

dardimandis lxinshi mnaxe, vina var! In a happy-go-lucky celebration see me, who I am!

jamit t’olumbashi mnaxe, vina var! A tolumbashi [toastmaster] with a drinking bowl, see me, who I am!

aba musht’is k’rivshi mnaxe, vina var! Well in the boxing of fists see me, who I am!

mashin shegiqvarde, stkva: dzvirpasi xar! Then you will fall in love with me, you will say, ‘You are precious!’

(Mukhambazi, Prince Grigol Orbeliani)

Moreover, in sharp distinction to the highly classicizing ‘high’ style Orbeliani advocated

elsewhere, in these poems Orbeliani adopts not only a ‘low’ ordinary style, but also one

redolent of the Armenian-inflected voice of city-dwellers and poets he imitated. Indeed,

he adopts this specific ‘low’ style for this cycle because these poems are imagined as

being sung or spoken by urban characters (kintos and qarachoghelis): ‘Gr. Orbeliani

considered his mukhambazis to be the monologues or songs of his characters: the poet

stifles, neutralizes his own voice, himself making the qarachoghelis speak. (Gatserelia

1959: 059)). The voice of the kinto and the voice of the mukhambazi were one and the

same, incorporated into the disemic repertoire of borrowed voices, borrowed styles,

borrowed genres, by which these gentry expressed their complex position entering

European service in an Asiatic city.

The Georgian gentry from Orbeliani onwards appropriated and adapted a form of

11 The gardens of Ortachala were a celebrated locale in Tbilisi for the feasting and drinking ritual of the supra for city residents.

23

poetry that existed primarily in a performance context of feasting rituals, always sung to

the accompaniment of specific forms of city music played on ‘asiatic’ instruments, and

turned it into a primarily textual genre standing independent of performance, music, and

ritual contexts of feasting. By appropriating and adapting these poetic genres indigenous

to the city, the newly urban gentry grounded their private life in the ‘oriental’ bohemia of

the city, in a manner that parallels and complements their adoption and adaptation of

primarily Russian romantic genres of poetry, expressive of their new-found ambivalent

position as subalterns members of a Tsarist bureaucratic caste (Ram and Shatirishvili

2004). These two ‘poetic voices’ that formed the endpoints of the repertoire of Georgian

nobility, between a ‘low’ urban, Armenian inflected voicing of the kinto, the mukhambazi

and the bazaar, and the ‘high’ classicizing romantic style, expressed their ambivalent

entry into city life both as embracing the asiatic bohemia of their city privately (Bregadze

2000, Nodia 2000), even as they established themselves as a relatively privileged class of

Tsarist bureaucrats in relation to the development of public life centered around the court

of the Viceroy in Tbilisi. The disemic opposition between genres of architectural

expression, Asiatic and European, and disemic spheres of gentry sociability, the Asiatic

feast (mejlisi, supra) and the European Court of the Viceroy (Bregadze 2000, Nodia

2000), that characterized nineteenth century Tbilisi, was echoed by the diglossic modes

of poetic expression by these gentry. Orbeliani, perhaps the most highly placed Georgian

noble in the latter half of the nineteenth century, shows a ‘complete contrast’ between his

‘outer life’ as an officer in Russian service and his ‘inner life’ as a poet in his poetic

works (Gatserelia 1959: 058). This poetic disemia appears clearly clearly in the extreme

polarization of the ‘high’ classicizing style of Georgian he used for his Russian-

influenced cycles of poetry, including many translations and adaptations of Russian

poets, and the extremely ‘low’ Armenian-inflected speaking voice of the city cycle

(Gatserelia 1959: 091). In fact, in his public statements defending the ‘high style’ of his

public voice in the intergenerational debates on literary style, he likens the public voice of

24

the new ‘journalist writers’ ( the ‘low style’) with Georgian as spoken (badly) by an

Armenian: ‘the language of the Bazaar, of an Armenian’ (Droebis ati..), yet this is more

or less the language he prefers for his own mukhambazi poems, for which he would, in

turn, be castigated for introducing a low style into Georgian.

The same ‘disemic’ opposition is found in meters and rhymes as well, Orbeliani

preferring a ‘weak’ rhyme scheme (final syllable only) typical of Russian and European

romantic models in his translations and ‘public’ poetry, and frequently using an ‘Asiatic’

multisyllabic rhyme scheme in his mukhambazis (Gatserelia 1959: 093).12 Similarly,

Orbeliani’s ‘asiatic’ mukhambazi love poems differentiate themselves from his more

‘European’ romantic poems by making a cult of, for example, praising moles on cheeks

as signs of beauty:

sat’rpos xali ars t’axt’i siq’varulis The mole of one’s beloved is the throne of love,

es piala iq’os sadghegrdzo xalis! Let this drinking-bowl be a toast to the mole!

(Gr. Orbeliani, muxambazi (‘sulit ertno’), 1835, p. 49-50)

Or here, in his ‘imitation of Sayat Nova’ (1833, p. 40-41)where the word for mole (xali)

occurs as part of a majami rhyme scheme:

magondebis ra mis ghac’vzeda xali I am somehow minded of a mole on her cheek,

siq’varulis guls megzneba ax, ali! It transports my heart of love, Oh, flame!

movshordi, vhscan oxroba, k’vnesa axali, Deliver me, I know hell, a new suffering,

xinik’o, xinik’o! xinik’o, xinik’o!

He introduced this feature (which he prided himself on having been the first to introduce

12 The apparent exception to these alignments of style and meter is his poem ‘toast’ or ‘toastmaster’, like a mukhambazi, set at a typical Georgian feast, but the thematic of this poem is a patriotic celebration of a Russian victory, hence the style follows his more public works.

25

to European Russian society) as a self-consciously asiatic and non-European stylistic

characteristic. As he remarked in a letter to his brother of 1834 : ‘Since I am an asiatic

[aziat’i], I like a mole on the cheek.... For this reason you know, don’t you, that they

don’t praise moles in Europe, they have no taste’ (Gatserelia 1959: 063).

The poetry of the next generation of Georgian urban intelligentsia was a

conscious rejection of this urban eclecticism and celebration of the figure of the kinto, as

part of a broader turn away from the eclectic repertoires of the urban gentry who

borrowed their public poetic voice from European Russian and classical sources, their

private festive voice from Oriental (Armenian and Persian) and urban sources. Instead,

this generation sought to separate Georgia as an integral figure from both Europe and

Asia (Ch’avchav’adze 1977 [1886])), creating repertoires that are entirely ‘national’ in

form. Years earlier another critic had criticized the poetry of this generation for its

‘lack of a national form ( nacionaluri k’ilo)’ (Droeba 1870 no. 6, p.1), criticizing it for

borrowing now from Persian, now from Russian sources and ignoring Georgian poetic

traditions.

As the themes of this period’s poems are directed towards ‘festivity’ (feasting,

salxino) and for singing, ...they do not depict the fate (ighbalsa) of the people,

where they were born, -- also the the language too of these poems is is bookish,

composed, artificial (shetxzuli) and not originating from heart and soul of the real

people, based on the poems and songs of the people—in a word the prosody does

not have a national k’ilo (nacionaluri k’ilo) . It doesn’t have a Georgian soul.

The greater part of such poems are wan-colored and weak imitations of Persian

poems, as in the singing k’ilo, so too the charm and themes of the poetry.... In this

century our writers began imitating Russia’s people and other people of Europe.

The aforementioned Persian k’ilo of poems was and remained only for women

(for well-born ones), as well as for urban (mokalake) merchants and traders. The

26

real people as a whole, however, has its own poetry, singing k’ilo and meter

(Droeba 1870 no. 2, 2-3)

The search for a ‘national form’ includes the creation of the ethnolinguistic identity of

Georgianness, the term k’ilo referring to any supervenient specificity of form in language

(dialect, accent), music, singing voice, poetic meter that has status- or style- indexing

values.

Vakhtang Orbeliani’s poem of 1884 ‘I do not like the k’ilo of the mukhambazi’

represents a crucial and representative moment in the polemic between inheritors of the

1860s generation intelligentsia (the ‘sons’, in Georgian called terg-daleulebi, ‘those who

have drunk from the Terek river’ (see Manning 2004)) position and the positions of city

poets and gentry romantics alike. As Shaqulashvili notes, this poem is a poetic

restatement (a ‘theoretical tractate’ in poetic form) of the achieved tergdaleuli (and more

generally, enlightener generation) consensus regarding city poetry (1987:84). The irony

of the poem is that it is cast in the form (k’ilo) of the mukhambazi, while it describes

itself as a critique of that form, in reality the critique is leveled at the typical thematic

content and typical contexts of performance of a mukhambazi (which are the same, since

the mukhambazi is reflexively calibrated so that the thematic content of the mukhambazi

(feasting) and the moment of its performance (at a feast) are the same). The key word in

the poem is k’ilo: k’ilo can mean variously ‘meter’, ‘dialect’ , ‘accent’, ‘intonation’,

‘tune’. Here it seems to mean the characteristic combination of linguistic, metrical and

musical features that as a whole characterize city music and city life, hence, I have

translated it as ‘sound’ or sometimes, ‘meter’. In effect, the author upbraids poets for

using a form (k’ilo) that has hitherto only been used to express a certain content, and he

gives them a laundry list of (primarily hackneyed European) thematics he deems to be

appropriate to poetry. Significant is the positing of the medieval Georgian poet Rustaveli

in particular as the antithesis of the mukhambazi (though Rustaveli himself, heavily

27

influenced by Persian poetic esthetics, presents problems of his own for his appropriation

into the canon of Georgianness), this poem emerges during the middle of the period in

which the Georgian gentry and nascent intelligentsia were producing an authoritative text

of the classic medieval Georgian poet Rustaveli (eventually printed in 1888 in a deluxe

illustrated edition) as a central moment of their cultural reform project. He begins:

p’oet’s, To the poet,

me ar miq’vars k’ilo mukhambazisa I do not like the sound (k’ilo) of the mukhambazi,

k’int’ot k’ilo, k’ilo shua-bazrisa: The sound (k’ilo) of the k’int’o, the sound (k’ilo) of the central Bazaar;

am k’iloti ra imghero, p’oet’o, With this meter (k’ilo) of what would you sing, poet,

tu ar ghvino, t’olubashi da k’int’o, If not of wine, toastmaster (tolu(m)bashi) and k’int’o,

mat duduk’i, dip’lip’it’o da zurna, Their duduk’i, dip’lip’it’o and zurna,13

mat uazro lazghandroba, q’izhina? Their pointless buffoonery, whooping?

me ar miqvars suratebi amgvari I do not like such scenes,

mukhambazit sxvas ras it’q’vi, mitxari? What else would you say with a mukhambazi, tell me?

Give me the k’ilo of Rustaveli,

Blossoming, like flowers of the field,

Serene, like a laughing font,

Like a river, prettily flowing.

With that meter show us other scenes,

Make us catch sight of fields, hills and mountains;

High above, the endless sea below;

Nature in the round, great, astonishing.

...

13 duduki, diplipito, zurna. duduk’i, dip’lip’it’o, zurna. Instruments typical of Tbilisi ‘city’ music, having a characteristically ‘oriental’ sound, to which the mukhambazi is typically sung.

28

First of all, delineating his stance, he provides a metracharacterization of the typical

content (‘wine, toastmasters, and k’int’os (street peddlers)’), which are also a fair

description of the typical speakers, audiences and context of performance, and

concomitant aesthetic and contextual features of performance (namely that, unlike

European poetry, city poetry is virtually always sung to the accompaniment of specific

instruments (whose oriental names he reproduces, duduk’i, dip’lip’ito’, and zurna)), and a

typical milieu (the urban milieu of the central bazaar and the street peddler). He not only

proposes that there is a specific thematic content to this form (‘With this form what

would you sing, poet, other than...’), but also that this form is accompanied by no positive

serious ‘sublime’ thematic content but only a jarring lack thereof (‘meaningless

bufoonery, whooping’).

The answer to this question, delineated in the subsequent stanzas of what is

formally, of course, a mukhambazi, are a laundry list of standard ‘European’ themes for

poetry: it devotes 18 lines to recommending the portrayal of nature (‘Show us sublime

nature, Its great manifold beauty’), four lines to patriotic themes of the heroic battle for

the motherland (‘show us the heroes of ancient times, Their terrible battle for the

homeland, The thunder of battle, the frightful battlefield’), 10 lines to love poetry and in

particular strictures on the representation of the romantic heroine (‘Let her be a rose,

from rains pale, And a flower, by winds tussled. Delicate, beautiful, calm and pure of

heart’) adding that she should be made to resemble the heroines of Schiller or

Shakespeare, and six lines to the plight of the peasant and the reviling of his exploiters.

The important thing is the specifically and self-consciously Europeanness of the thematic

content (nature, love, patriotism and social justice), and classical Georgianness of form

(‘give me the k’ilo of Rustaveli), opposed to the obviously Asiatic form and content of

the mukhambazi (which literally sings of a purely hedonistic world of wine and feasts, the

urban world of the bazaar and the k’int’o).

As this poem suggests, the kinto has come to represent the asiatic life of the city

29

tout court, and is contrasted with the specific exemplar of the Georgian people, the

peasant, who are divorced from city life. The authentic life of Georgia, and its authentic

speakers and genres of expression, are not to be found in the kinto and the mukhambazi,

but in the oral culture of the peasantry.

By the time of this poem, Georgian gentry had already begun the process of

urbanization for more than a generation. Georgian gentry ‘society’ (sazogadoeba) had

been transformed from an estate based on land-ownership and aristocratic lineage to a

class of Russian-educated service nobles and writers in service of ‘the people’, an

‘intelligentsia’. For many of the ‘sons’, the urban landscape of Tbilisi was presumably

not the romantic novelty it may have been for many of those gentry who came to Tbilisi

earlier in the century. Yet for both generations their village of origin, wherever it might

be in Georgia, would never be very far away. The gentry of the 1870’s were already

engaging in that urban-rural seasonal transhumancy that would characterize much of the

population of the city of Tbilisi by the present day. However, just as we might suppose

the men of the 1840’s found the life of the city to be strange and novel, and

correspondingly we find for the men of the 1870’s in all likelihood the life of ‘their’

villages (or those villages in which they accepted work as Tsarist bureaucrats) may well

have been a relatively novel experience. Just as the gentry ‘society’ was beginning to

transform itself into an ‘intelligentsia’ who spoke for the ‘people’, the categories of

‘society’ and ‘people’ were separated residentially as urbanites and villagers.

It is precisely in this seasonal cycle of gentry urban-rural transhumancy that P.

Umikashvili locates his innaugural call for the study of Georgian folk poetry (1871)

(Manning 2004). The seasonal return of urban ‘society’ to their respective villages

provides a potential occasion not merely for pleasurable rest but also edifying and

valuable social work, in the collecting of specimens of folk life and becoming acquainted

with the life of the people:

30

Summer has come and the society (sazogadoeba) of our cities is going out to the

village. How many could have gained much utility along with pleasure!

Whoever has studied anything and has intelligence, in the village how much bad

and good he would make his eye observe, how much new he would become

aware of and see, he would get to know the life of the people! (Umikashvili

1871:1)

The gentry ‘society’ of the cities does indeed live among the people of the village in the

summer. The potential for society (sazogadoeba), who live the rest of the year in the

cities, to come to know (gacnoba) the people (xalxi), who live in the villages, exists

under precisely these conditions.

How best to know the people? Of course, by collecting ‘folk stories, songs,

shairi, tales, riddles, charms, proverbs’, because ‘the people’s beliefs, thoughts, suffering,

happiness, hope—are expressed and dispersed in the poems and stories of the people’

(ibid. 2). The work of folkloric collection will be done, he says, by correspondence, and

this correspondence will be entirely from urban, enlightened society, yet from the village.

How? Because his correspondents, chiefly young students, ‘almost all’ live in the village

in the summer, and do nothing there, hence they have free time to engage in this work. In

turn, the work will be useful to them, for they will learn a ‘real dialect (k’ilo) of the

Georgian language close-up’(ibid. 2), that is, as opposed to urban dialects of the k’int’o.

As another Georgian nationalist advocating reconstructing the primordial unity of the

medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli’s language from just such folkloric materials

argued,

When Rustaveli existed, Georgia formed one kingdom and was not divided into

different principalities; It also had one language, that is, that language, which

Rustaveli used. After Georgia fell, the kingdom was divided into provinces; often

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one province was habitually under the influence and slavery of an external enemy

just when the other remained free. In such an enslaved province many Georgian

words (leksebi) would be lost and instead of them other foreign words would

come in when, when in an unenslaved province however that word remained. So

in this way different words sheltered themselves in different parts and provinces

of Georgia. Today it is our duty to collect those words and bring them into the

treasury of language and not to banish them only on the grounds that, as he says,

“kintos (peddlers) in the city don’t use that word...” (Tsereteli 1874: 111)

Folklore abandoned the city, the ‘k’ilo of the kinto, the k’ilo of the central bazaar’, and

moved to the village to find the ‘k’ilo of Rustaveli’, which is the same as the k’ilo of the

‘folk’.

Who, then, are the folk? ‘What must be written down in general is what people

(xalxi), that is peasant folk (glexi xalxi), village folk (soplis xalxi), sing.’ (ibid.) Thus,

the ‘people’ are first of all peasants (and do not belong to the nobility or any other estate),

and they are not to be found in the city, but only in the village. They are, then, the

opposite of the emerging (noble) society of the cities, the very nobility who will study

them in their natal villages to which they retire during the summer.

Lest the elision of city material from folklore appear to be merely an oversight, he

adds this methodological stricture, which includes a direct criticism of the preceding

generation, who not only, as obliquely noted before, neglect folk poetry, but also favor

city poetry in their chrestomathies. First of all, there is the question of source, the ‘folk’

are collective authors of ‘folk songs and stories’, which express their collective hopes,

dreams, etc. City poetry is always the work of some specific writer (not collective), or if

it is does hail from beyond the boundaries of individualized sazogadoeba (the domain of

individual writers), it hails from the collective agency of the urban guilds (in any case not

a peasant representative of the folk):

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Among us they mix folk [saxalxo] (peasant [glexis], village [soplur]) songs and

city [kalakur] songs. In the city our songs are either expressed by some specific

writer , or it is composed among the working craftsmen of the guilds of the city.

Here are some examples: among the poems of Alexandre Chavchavadze, Besiki

(Besarion Gabashvili), Davit (Batonishvili), Stepan Pershangova and in our recent

times Skandarova, or additionally those poems like Kalo Xabadiano, ---- These

are all composed in cities and they sing them in cities.. (ibid. 2)

But this is not all, not only is the source defective, but the form of what results is also

essentially non-peasant (non-Georgian). The key measure here of aesthetics is a

Europeanizing one of intertranslatability: it is as if the Georgian folk, while not

European, nevertheless their folk music harmonizes essentially with European music,

while city music is explicitly asiatic (Persian-Tatar). Georgian (folk) music harmonizes

with European tunes, and Polyphonic chorals make wonderful European trios, while city

music is Persian-Tatar, and the songs ‘become very ugly’ when transposed into European

tunes, adding that ‘ There is a big difference in voice between poems as such and songs.

For this reason I say, that they call those things folk (saxalxo), national (saero) poems,

tales, songs, that a village peasant sings and says.’ (ibid.)

The answer to ‘what should we write?’ revolves heavily around the question of

‘who are the people’? Clearly, the ‘people’ and poetry genres of interest to this

generation of nobles and nascent intelligentsia are very different from those that

interested the preceding generation. Notable is the conscious elision of Tbilisi from the

map of Georgian folk life, the conscious alignment (without identification) of Georgian

rural life with European life, and urban life with inauthentic Asiatic qualities, that is, the

authentic Georgian folk, like the European interest in their own folk. Hence, too,

Europeanness comes to denote not courtly, urban, society, but peasant, rural, society.

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Discovering everyday life in the country becomes a positive complement to the explicit

rejection of the everyday life and genres of the city, the genres of rural folklore and

medieval poetry (Rustaveli) replaces the k’ilo of the mukhambazi, the k’ilo (dialect) of

the peasant replaces the ‘kilo of the k’int’o, the k’ilo of the central bazaar.’

The kinto, now transformed into an image of city life as a whole, but with a

negative valorization, opposed to the true Georgianness of the peasant in the countryside,

leaves Georgians without a home in the city and its traditional modes of expression. It is

not until the 1920s that a new vision of city-life, the urban folklorist and poet

Grishashvili, whose folkloric apologetic for Tbilisi, not published until the early sixties,

resurrects the now increasingly denatured folkloric image of the kinto, still with a

negative valorization, casting him now in opposition to another traditional figure of the

city, the guild crafstman or qarachogheli. Grishashvili argues forcefully that, while

‘many think that folk literature is only preserved in villages’, city life can be the proper

object of Georgian folklore (129). Moreover, the texts studied by folklore need not be

anonymous to be expressions of ‘the people’:

By ‘folk literature’ often is meant such creative works, whose author is unknown

or lost; but, in my opinion, such creative works should be called ‘folk’, which

flows forth bravely from the heart of the child of the folk, without cosmetics, in

its primitive form and the author also is, more or less, known to us. (129)

But he retains the negative valorization of the kinto, by attributing all the recieved

positive moral properties of the kinto to a different figure, the craftsman qarachogheli.

Grishashvili’s discussion expresses the two, often confused by others, as polar opposites,

the Kinto being a debased form of the guild craftsman. He gives the two a series of polar

and distinct semiotic characteristics, in each case the kinto being a debased version of the

qarachogheli, beginning with their distinctive dress and moving to other characteristics:

34

The qarachogheli’s voice- sweet and impressive

The kinto’s voice-- hoarse and dry.

The qarachogheli’s mannerisms are firm,

That of the kinto-- bumpy.

The qarachogheli-- himself makes verbal works of art;

The kinto-- mangles these words as well....

The qarachogheli’s music is the duduki (traditional instrument)

The kinto’s --the street organ.....

The qarachogheli’s drinking equipment was a china jami, a clay piala (drinking

bowl), a azarpesha (kind of cup,bowl), a wooden kula (a long necked drinking

vessel) engraved (shechedili) with silver.

The kinto doesn’t even know the names of these vessels, he rejects these ‘belt-

wearing’ (pants wearing?) glasses and in imitation of foreign bohemians drinks

wine from a woman’s shoe....

The Qarachogheli frequently thinks up himself all kinds of new pastimes, which

later become traditions (adats);

The kinto destroys these traditions (adats): His pastimes: gambling, obscenities,

[and] the sin of sodomy.... (Grishashvili 138-140)

Among other things, the kinto also debases the original compositions of the qarachogheli,

simplifying their meter and translating them into Russian (Grishashvili 139). This last

feature indexes what another writer cited by Grishashvili calls a ‘love of translating’

typical of kintos, indexing a mixed, not quite Georgian, not quite masculine, identity.

The opposition between the two is developed for many pages, forming a central place in

his imagining of the city and the ‘real’ Tbilisian (also in Grishashvili cite). Grishashvili

concludes his discussion of the two types, one arising from the harmony of peoples in the

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east in guest-host friendship relations, the other from the mixture mediated by cash-nexus

of the central bazaar, the one representing a craftsman, the sphere of production, the other

a derivative representative of the seedier aspects of city life, the bazaar and exchange:

What conditions helped form these classes?

The qarachogheli is the older generation of Old Tbilisi. The qarachogheli is the

citizen of Tbilisi of that time, when ‘the life of Kartli’ [was written].... The

qarachogheli is a synthesis of Georgian-Persian relations and generally of guest-

host relations between the peoples of the East among us.

The kinto, however, was created in the mixed environs of the bazaar, when petty

huckstering outstripped craftsmanship. He is the dregs of the family of the

qarachoghelis, raised in the streets and at the backgammon tables....

The kinto retains a negative valorization based on his petty trader involvement in

exchange, while the qarachogheli, by virtue of his involvement of production not only of

material goods, but also of authentic folkloric texts and customs, becomes the positively

valued and authentic city-dweller. The kinto in turn represents an inauthetic lumpen

derivation of this noble figure, one who neither produces the goods he exchanges, nor

produces the texts and customs that he russifies and otherwise uglifies. The positive and

negative aspects of city life can be segregated, producing a figure of imitation in whom

the Georgians can find a home in the city, a productive figure both of words and deeds,

and a negative figure to personify all the negative, and less Georgian, aspects of city life,

especially exchange, the kinto.

Grishashvili recreated Tbilisi as a ‘bohemia’, a cosmopolitan, Asiatic-European, yet

Georgian, milieu in which the Georgian intelligentsia could find themselves at home. In

fact Grishashvili regrounds the urban aristocratic intelligentsia in the qarachogheli,

calling its primary exemplar, Grigol Orbeliani, a ‘Int’eligent’ qarachogheli’ (81), that is

36

at once a member of the intelligentsia as well as an indigene of the city, an authentic, real

Tbilisian, a qarachogheli. Grishashvili’s mythology of Old Tbilisi was canonized under

socialism in the 1948 musical love story Keto da K’ot’te, in which the Qarachogheli

becomes the preferred symbol of the productive (proto-proletarian) members of urban

society, and the muxambazis of Orbeliani in this movie are placed in their mouths. By

the end of the twentieth century, these figures have entered into the pantheon of urban

nostalgia and kitsch (Qipiani 2003), restaurants in Tbilisi are decorated with images of

kintos, or bear names like ‘mukhambazi’.

In contrast to this bohemian mythology of urban identity, the deposed president,

Zviad Gamsakhurdia, took a rather dim view of the nineteenth century aristocracy (and

perhaps, by extension, their heirs amongst the intelligentsia), arguing that they betrayed

Georgia as they left behind their roles as defenders of the nation and entered into this

bohemian, dissolute lifestyle of consumption of the city (Gamsakhurdia 569-70). Echoing

Vakhtang Orbeliani’s criticisms of a century earlier, the adoption of the ‘language of the

kinto, the language of the central bazaar’ and ‘Persian tunes’ by the aristocracy was in

effect another signal of their betrayal of indigenous national tradition, moving from

sublime Georgian poetry and ‘pure tunes’ bequeathed them by their ancestors, to a

‘culinary’ poetry obsessed with consumption (since the mukhambazi revolves around

events of drinking and feasting), calling it ‘a vulgar, banal style of speaking and culinary

soul’ (Gamsakhurdia 408):

And lo, the idiom of the central bazaar and culinary associations little by little

banished mountain goats, withered roses and irises, wrung swans by the neck, and

first the smuggled-in duduk’i and later the unruly din of the tambourine and zurna

drowned out the sounds of the seven-stringed lyre (the bell of the

rainbow)....Among other things, the etymology of his name well defines his nature

and also the nature of his dance [sc. the dance named for the kinto], which today has

37

flooded all of Georgia and which even today is considered a miracle of

choreographic aesthetics and and almost even a Georgian national dance.

Gamsakhurdia gives an obscene (‘unquotable’) Persian word as the etymology, adding

that the dance of the kinto is a ‘candidate’s’ dance with homosexual overtones, originally

performed in ‘the harems of sultans and shahs’, brought into broad daylight; their poetry

is not the poetry of ‘Old Tbilisi’ (a place which contains churches, after all), but the

poetry of ‘old Satan’s Bazaar’!

But even old urbanite followers of Gamsakhurdia (‘Zviadists’) will not always

follow him that far. Thecontinuing relevance of Grishashvili’s work was brought home

to me at a supra in Tbilisi with a few friends, when the toastmaster Temo, an exemplary

Old Tbilisian, accomplished toastmaster, singer, heavy smoker and drinker, and, as it

happens, connosseur of Grishashvili’s ouvre, began a toast to the city, to Tbilisi. He

commenced by telling a story which seemed familiar, until I realized that he was

repeating line by line from memory the introduction from Grishashvili’s book. He

continued into the distinction between the qarachogheli and kinto, animating in a lively

manner the linguistic differences between these figures, performing and vivifying

Grishashvili’s own account. He concluded that the ‘true Tbilisians’ were the

intelligentsia, who were in turn inheritors of the Georgian aristocracy. In fact, the

qarachogheli himself was a true aristocrat in word and deed, another true ancestor of the

‘real Tbilisians’, the intelligentsia. Then, as the toast became more of a discussion of the

city today versus the city then, the figure of the kinto became more in the fore. The kinto,

in turn, turns out to be the ancestor of Tbilisi today, the Tbilisi not of the intelligentsia but

of the New Georgians and uncultured peasants, of city life dominated by uncultured and

tasteless petty capitalist exchange. ‘Tbilisi has become a city of kintos’, another friend

ruefully concluded. If the Georgian aristocracy made the city their home in the figure of

the kinto, by now the ‘aristocracy of the soul’, the intelligentsia, expressed their sense of

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homelessness now with the same figure.

These two nineteenth century discourses, a private ‘esoteric’ one which celebrates

the ‘Bohemia’ of Old Tbilisi, associating it with an urbane milieu, an appropriate home

for the intelligentsia, and a public ‘exoteric’ one, an ethnolinguistic discourse celebrates

the timeless homogeneous virtues of Georgian village life, developed into a complex

disemia characteristic of the socialist intelligentsia. For just as the socialist intelligentsia

developed out of and inherited the mantle of the Tsarist gentry, their own confused

position is determined by their ability to stand at the intersection of, and mediate, these

two discourses. For this to happen, the intelligentsia speaking subject must be

residentially separate from the villager of/for/to whom they speak. The collapse of the

privileged position of the intelligentsia comes to the fore when these categories can no

longer be kept apart, when the village comes home to haunt.

Objective kultura: Balconies, Courtyards, and the homes of the new Georgians

The coup of 1992 was not the first time Tbilisi has experienced a violent transformation of its

architectural space. In fact, for a city that is sometimes claimed to be one of the oldest

continuously inhabited urban areas on the face of the earth (more than 6 thousand years

according to Bolkvadze 2003: 28), very little in the way of architecture remains that predates

the 19th century aside from the baths and a few churches. This is because the city was razed

almost entirely prior to Russian occupation by the Persian invasion of the late 18th century, so

much so, that a European observer at around 1812 remarked that Tbilisi at that time

presented little more than a ‘mass of ruins’ (Freygang 1823[1812]:128). So, unlike many

‘Oriental’ cities that underwent ‘European’ colonization, such as Tunis (Messick), the

opposition between ‘European’ and ‘Asiatic’ architecture that developed in Tbilisi under

Russian rule was not entirely an opposition between the old and the new, but rather, the two

architectural streams developed almost simultaneously. By mid-century Tbilisi presented an

image of continuous opposition of ‘European’ and ‘Oriental’ elements:

39

The mixture of Oriental and European structures gives a very peculiar character to

the town. It iswell known that eastern nations are partial to narrow, shady streets,

whilst the Russians like the contrary. These contrasts are presented in many parts

of Tiflis. In all parts where Russian builders have been employed, you find space,

air, sun and a free prospect; whilst, wheresoever the old architecture has remained

untouched, the streets and squares are narrow and dark, although not to the same

extent as in genuine Moslem cities. (Wagner 1856: 123-4)

Now, these different architectural styles characteristic of the colonial period city are

aggregated together as ‘Old Tbilisi’ and face some of the same fates. The tragic earthquake

of 2003 lade bare the infrastructural neglect of old architectural monuments under socialism

compared to the stolid durability of the ugly, but serviceable, 16 story ‘corpus’ buildings

erected in the socialist period. As if following some vulgar marxist division of the universe

into ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, new buildings erected under socialism made up for in

infrastructure what they lacked in ‘superstructural’ decoration, while Old Tbilisi was reduced

in socialist planning to a purely exterior, cultural, superstructural phenomenon (Qipiani

2003). The result was the architectural ‘theatricalization’ of Old Tbilisi, whose exterior

‘extra-utilitarian’ aspects were assiduously tended to, virtual ‘potemkin villages’ for socialist

holidays, tourism and sightseeing, while the ‘utilitarian’ infrastructure of the old buildings

was let go to rack and ruin (Qipiani 2003).

Perhaps this, more than anything, explains why while Tbilisians love the architecture of

the old city, seemingly no one actually wants to live in such buildings (Suramelashvili 2003),

‘corpus’ style buildings having several advantages over older ‘non-standard’ buildings,

among them communication infrastructure (such as running water), earthquake-proof

solidity, and the fact that they are already detached in such a way from their neighbors so that

lengthy negotiations regarding improvement, ownership of common walls, bringing in lines

40

of communication, are already solved. Ironically, corpus apartments built under socialism

have ‘built in’ the detachability from context needed to serve as ready made transactable,

alienable, property in a capitalist market, whereas Old Tbilisi buildings are neither detachable

as commodities or property, nor do they have the internal infrastructure of the corpus

apartments. The fact of the prestigious location of Old Tbilisi confronts the fact that the

interiors of such buildings lack these two features, features that allow them to serve as private

property and a comfortable domicile isolated from ones neighbors in a dangerous and

uncertain urban environment.14

Now, in the years immediately following the fall of socialism, Tbilisi seems to be

undergoing a new and radical architectural transformation that threatens the material

landscape, both Russian and ‘Asiatic’, that survived the massive growth of the city under

Tsarism to Post-socialism from a city of a few more than 16,000 at the beginning of the

nineteenth century (1803) to a city of almost a million and a half of today (Beridze 2003: 35).

If much of the socialist period was additive, new neighborhoods, the new architecture is often

transformative, destructive changes to the old architecture being replaced by the new. This

destruction is not the pure material destruction wrought by wars and coups, but a destruction

that is more threatening because it is wrought by the wheels of commerce, visible

everywhere, the aggregate irrational and destructive product of the individually rational and

creative actions of newly-liberated liberal subjects.

In various ways, the opposition between these two forms of architecture, neither

of which are particularly characteristic of Tbilisi, the bulk of which was erected during

socialism, have come to be polarized as ‘reflections’ of differing types of sociability: the

architecture of Old Tbilisi reflecting a balance between openness and closedness that

makes it a reflection of a kind of ‘open society’, indigenous ‘civil society’ avant la lettre

avant la lettre (Suramelashvili 2003: 7), opposed to the closedness and separation from

context, both physical and architectural that characterizes the homes of the new

14 Insert my friend Malkhazi’s illustrative saga?

41

Georgians, surrounded by walls that demarcate them as property even as they display

post-modern combinations of styles that demarcate them stylistically from their context,

reflecting a class of property owners obsessed both with theatrical displays of wealth and

its protection.

The Tbilisi of art is one that consists entirely of balconies, a Tbilisi from which 70

years of socialism is erased. This is Tbilisi as portrayed in the watercolors one can buy

for a few dollars from starving artists along Rustaveli prospect:

(Old Tbilisi Watercolour)

But since Old Tbilisi neighborhoods are quite prestigious, yet the buildings therein do not

make safe, isolated or reliable residences, there is the ironic result that these neighborhoods

which are prestigious in the first instance because they are old and distinctive have become

prestigious in a rather more deracinated way. The hierarchy of neighborhood prestige under

capitalism, expressed in US dollars per square meter, echoes the hierarchy of prestige under

socialism, in which erstwhile intelligentsia neighborhoods (the most prestigious being Vake)

and Old Tbilisi (Mtatsminda, Vera) outrank neighborhoods like Saburtalo and Didube. The

ironic result is that prestigious new ‘post-modern’ homes tend to be erected precisely in those

neighborhoods that were originally prestigious because of their distinctive architecture.

This material transformation of the city is simultaneously a transformation of urban

elites, one of which acts materially, the other morally, one with deeds, the other words. Two

elites find themselves in conflict, each with their own imagination of the city, their own

emblematic form of architectural expression, the permeable ‘openness’ of enclosed spaces of

the balcony and the courtyard faces off against the isolated, walled off, outward display of

wealth. The inheritors of the intelligentsia tradition find themselves able to do little more

than write about their city (Suramelashvili 2003: 6, Andronikashvili 2003: 32), in the absence

of a socialist state an activity without an effective addressee (Lominashvili 2004).

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Meanwhile the city is being destroyed by another group of elites who act anonymously and

silently, but more influentially, changing the material fact of the city in their own image.

These new elites (‘the client’) have no commonly accepted name in Georgia: ‘In Europe they call them ‘Nouveau Riche’, in Russia ‘New Russians’, among us they still remain nameless. But aside from anonymity their handwriting is strangely similar in every country.’ They do not speak publicly, they have no

ideologues, they seem not to need them, their buildings ‘speak for themselves’ for all to see

(Lominashvili 2004).

This new type of person tries to acquire the most expensive plots of land in

(historically constituted as) prestigious neighborhoods and on acquired plots

insolently, brazenly they destroy any buildings encountered whether it is a

monument, or made of planks, is not of principle importance. Then they try to

transplant in Tbilisi houses in their opinion ‘elegant and beautiful’, more intelligible

to themselves or seen in Latin-American soap operas. And, by the way, this happens

very successfully and rapidly. (Andronikashvili 2003: 33)

These new nameless elites leave anonymous autographs on the cityscape in the form of their

houses, but this autograph remains quite legible, for all to see. Their ‘white brazilian villas’

exteriorly stand in sharp contrast to the cityscape of Tbilisi, and from the interior, it can only

be imagined, they remain texts stylistically isolated from their urban context, save by the fact

that their context is prestigious. The interior view, like the motives, of the anonymous

‘customers’ can only be imagined, but it is easy enough to imagine:

And so what, if it is built in an old neighborhood of Tbilisi? When you wake up in

such a house, when you step out on its reinforced concrete balcony proudly, and when

you see somewhere three stories below the warped roofs of old Tbilisi card-houses,

43

you will entirely forget that you are in Georgia and you will think that you are on the

shore of the Mediterranean or the ocean, (there could be the rustling of palms and you

might even hear the squawking of parrots). In short, your life-long dream has come

true. And (besides) you are in your own house, and...you are abroad. Your house,

neither inside or out, resembles nothing and goes with nothing in its vicinity.

(Andronikashvili ibid.)

Such a complete divorce from urban context is itself taken to be a sign of the nouveau riche

way of being in the city, in which urban context is evaluated as little more than a way of

conferring prestige on an integral architectural object otherwise completely isolated from its

surrounds interiorly and exteriorly.

The badness of the most recent architecture is exactly that the authors of today’s

house-building and the owners of these houses by a specific conception (city-building

had its own conception) destroyed, attacked the already constituted plastic art [?] of

the city, invaded it like a foreign body. These houses were built as blocks (which is

thoroughly alien to an old city) like islands into a united organism by a principle of

isolation, privatization/ setting apart, [and] clear marking of boundaries/bounding

off,15 in no way to they flow/go/mix together with the spatial-volume totality; even

more—in dimensions, in form and, what is most important for city-building, lack of

care of consideration, foresight, for landscape and for relief (shape), they destroyed

its appearance. and among other things, not only physically, but also morally they

humiliated the rights of the city. (Qipiani 2003: )

If the new elites act silently, they ‘write’ texts with the authority of money, buildings which

the old elites, the intelligentsia, can only ‘read’ and write about. And read them they do, for

15 similar to entextualization/contextualization only with prtoperty, see also Graeber.

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in their buildings can be ‘read’ the psychology of the new classes, one not only emphasizing

the autonomy of property owners and their property expressed in the spatial divorce of their

homes from from the cityscape, but also their lack of temporal connection to the city.

Qipiani (2003: 11) calls these new elites ‘lumpen-capitalists’ whose identity is expressed in

the form of their buildings ‘as a symbol, a sign and a metaphor’:

This can happen when the sense for space and time is lost, when memory, biography,

history no longer exists , even one’s own, as treasury (paseuloba); life is only for the

day and accordingly there is nothing to lose; thus was formed this strange psychology

of a strange social class which was materialized as a fact in house-building, in its

forms, in its dimensions, in the inter-relationship of the whole and the parts. It can be

said that this class represented and gave form to its own intellectual-psychological

situation in the very houses it has erected, which are an interested and rich material

for a psychoanalyst, and a tragedy for the city. (Qipiani, 10 original emphasis)

The Tbilisi balcony, like the Tbilisi courtyard, are taken as signs of the existing Tbilisi order,

the opposite of this divorce of architectural figure from urban ground, one in which

‘openness’ of social relations are encoded in architectural form by the way in which exterior

spaces are ‘interiorized’ (traditional Tbilisi courtyards) and interior spaces ‘exteriorized’

(Tbilisi Balconies), very differently from the unmediated separations of interior and exterior

exhibited in the walled and separated compounds of the new elites, or the reinforced iron

doors with multiple locks in vogue amongst corpus-dwellers. Note that here Tbilisianness is

linked to Georgianness of architecture:

The Georgian, and to that extent, Tbilisian historically constituted home also speaks

volumes; such a closed-doored-ness did not characterize the cultute of our everyday

existence, and not only 19th century dwellings, but also flat-roofed houses existing up

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to that point, attests to this, when the flat roof (bani) was not only a military, but also

an everyday agrarian and inter-communication means. The Georgian house (if it was

not a fort designed for fortification) neither in the city, nor in the village was built

with the principle ‘My home is my fortress’....The Tbilisian balconied house, often

with one face looking from the courtyard to the street, indicates openness, open

relationships; on the other hand, the facades (pasadi) and the principals of internal

planning and organization of space also attests that the openness is not absolute. The

Georgian character has always been distinguished by its balance of individual

diversity and universal/general interdependence and this in our psychic and material

activity, in our culture of everyday life and communication is portrayed, and

correspondingly in our residences (Qipiani 2003: 10)

If Tbilisi balconies and courtyards are represented as being part of a general Georgian

tradition including bani (a flat roof which doubles as a balcony for the house above)

expressing a balance of open and closed, interiority and exteriority, this ‘lumpen-

capitalist’ privatized separation and esthetic superficiality, the architectural equivalent

of ‘mariazhoba’, is given a geneology in the socialist ‘theatricalized’ ‘stylized’ and

‘folklorized’ appropriation of national culture on the one hand, resulting in an ‘asocial,

pseudohistorical, and formalist mythologized culture’, which realized itself both in the

psychological shallowness and lack of spatial awareness and reflexiveness

characteristic of the ‘lumpen-capitalist’ mariazhi, as well as in the architectural

‘theatricalization’ of old Tbilisi, a program that emphasized superficial external upkeep

of visible balconies and building exteriors while neglecting the interior infrastructure,

communications, and foundations of these same buildings (Qipiani 2003: 12). During

the restoration of Old Tbilisi attention was paid to national forms (balconies and

facades), the literal ‘superstructures’, at the expense of socialist contents (plumbing,

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communications, interiors), the literal ‘base’, just as in new projects the reverse was

the case.

This critical ‘reading’ of Old Tbilisi finds in the new elites of the city a kind of

deracinated socialist genealogy, a ‘pseudoculture’ whose characteristic architectural

forms, ‘Tbilisi post-modern’, so far from being yet another form of post-modern

‘hybridity’ to be celebrated in the flux, hybridity and novelty of ‘the city’ as a universal

category, in fact registers a ‘theatricalization’ of national culture filtered through

socialism, culture become kitsch. In turn, the Old Tbilisi architecture is now re-rooted

in the Georgian tradition, the Tbilisi Balcony and Courtyard now find their analogs in

the Georgian village, in the bani, and both reflect a constant, essential characteristic of

the Georgian character. The two aspects of the intelligentsia discourse, the celebration

of the specificities of Tbilisi and the Georgian national character, are reconciled by a

segementary logic of opposition to the new moneyed elites. Moreover, the content of

the imputed Georgian character reflected in Georgian architecture is one which

positions Georgian culture and architecture somewhere between ‘closedness’ and

openness, indigenous doubles of desirable ‘European’ characteristics (‘open society’)

without the European excesses (found in the homes of the New Georgians). In this

intelligentsia discourse, Tbilisi architecture is the very image of an ‘open society’, a

balancing of individual and collective, openness and closedness, so that the freshly

imported discourses of ‘civil society’ of the ‘new intellectuals’ too find themselves a

traditional home in the ‘City of Balconies’.

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1. The Georgian ethnographic museum seen from the city

2. The city seen from the museum

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INSERT (Socialist Internal Passport: categories of identity)

A) Front, including registration of natsionalnost B) Registration of residence

(Nationality: Here: ‘Georgian’) (Here: ‘Dolidze street 78’

[Urban residence])

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Cartoon

In the village In the city

-- Child, do you have a hoe? -- Do you have a thermos?

-- No hoes, lady, but we do have -- No thermoses, but we have sickles,

table bells, ventilators, thermoses picks, shovels, hoes and yoghurt bottles.

and Opera music books.

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Old Tbilisi watercolour

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