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Rhyming the National Spirit: A Comparative Inquiry into the Works and Activities of Taras Shevchenko and Ilia Chavchavadze

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2019

Tornike Metreveli
Tornike Metreveli*
Affiliation:
Department of Russian Culture and Society, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: tornike.metreveli@unisg.ch
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Abstract

The article is a comparative inquiry into the roles of Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) and Taras Shevchenko (1818–1861) as national poets and anti-tsarist intellectuals within the context of their respective national traditions (in Georgia and Ukraine). During the period of their activity (19th and the beginning of 20th century), both Ukraine and Georgia were under tsarist imperial rule (albeit the two poets lived in different periods of Russian imperial history). Through their major works, each called for their communities to awaken and revolt against oppression, rejected social apathy caused by tsarist subjugation, and raised awareness about the historical past of their nations. By comparing the works and activities of the two poets and examining their impact on national mobilization in tsarist Ukraine and Georgia, this article argues that (lyric) poetry rather than prose (novel) constituted the agency of common national imagining. It was lyric and not epic poetry or novel, this article shows, that laid the foundation of nationalist mobilization as it framed the revolt of the “I” against colonialism as a revolt of the “I” against an oppressive society under which the cultural grounds for common imagining had been constructed.

Keywords

GeorgiaUkrainenational identityanti-colonial nationalismnationalist poetry
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 47 , Special Issue 5: Special Issue on the Donbas Conflict , September 2019 , pp. 894 - 912
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

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