Caucasian prisoners, or How Georgian intellectuals invent traditions and (re)produce meanings

Размещено на http://allbest.ru

Voronezh State University

Caucasian prisoners, or how Georgian intellectuals invent traditions and (re)produce meanings

Maksym W. Kyrchanoff

Voronezh

Abstract

The author of the article analyses various cultural tactics, practices and strategies that Georgian intellectuals used for the invention of traditions and the (re)production of meanings. The author presumes that various cultural practices and social strategies of Georgian intellectuals became the main incentives for the transformation of traditional local groups into the Georgian modern nation. The history of the 20th century promoted the fragmentation of Georgian intelligentsia. The disintegration of the USSR, the restoration of state sovereignty and political independence of Georgia became powerful stimuli for the radical and deep fragmentation of the thinking-class into intelligentsia and intellectuals. The author states that intelligentsia and intellectuals coexist in modern Georgia simultaneously, but this social and cultural cohabitation is temporary because the intelligentsia became an endangered social and cultural category. Georgian intellectuals are genetic heirs of the old intelligentsia. The permanent voluntary and forced participation in the imagination of the nation and the invention of traditions as the formation and promotion of new myths brings together intelligentsia and intellectuals. The dynamics of the 20th century turned Georgian intellectuals into cultural hostages of modernization and processes of constant (re)production of the identities and meanings, including nation, space, freedom, independence etc.

Keywords: Georgia; intelligentsia; intellectual communities; intellectuals; nation; nationalism; myths; intellectual history

Аннотация

Кавказские пленники, или как грузинские интеллектуалы изобретают традиции и (вос)производят смыслы

Кирчанов Максим Валерьевич.ФГБОУ ВО "Воронежский государственный университет.

Автор статьи анализирует различные культурные тактики, практики и стратегии, которые грузинские интеллектуалы используют для изобретения традиций и (вос)производства смыслов.

Автор полагает, что различные культурные практики и социальные стратегии грузинских интеллектуалов стали основными стимулами для трансформации традиционных локальных групп в современную грузинскую нацию.

История 20 века содействовала фрагментации грузинской интеллигенции.

Распад СССР, восстановление государственного суверенитета и политический независимости Грузии стали мощнейшими стимулами для радикальной и глубокой фрагментации мыслящего класса на интеллигенцию и интеллектуалов.

Автор полагает, что интеллигенция и интеллектуалы сосуществуют в современной Грузии одновременно, но это социальное и культурное совместное пребывание является временным, потому что интеллигенция как социальная и культурная категория встала под угрозу.

Грузинские интеллектуалы являются генетическими наследниками старой интеллигенции.

Постоянное добровольное и вынужденное участие в воображении нации и изобретение традиций как формирование и продвижение новых мифов роднит представителей интеллигенции и интеллектуалов.

Историческая и политическая история и динамика 20 века превратила грузинских интеллектуалов в культурных заложников модернизации и процессов постоянного воспроизводства идентичностей и смыслов, в том числе, таких как нация, пространство, свобода, независимость и т.д.

Ключевые слова: Грузия; интеллигенция; интеллектуальные сообщества; интеллектуалы; нация; национализм; мифы; интеллектуальная история

Introduction

Formulation of the problem. Modern nations are the main political actors in the contemporary world, and it is generally agreed today that their histories are extremely short. First nations, in present-day political and civil sense, appeared in Europe after the historic triumph of capitalism, and bourgeois revolutions b e- came the main incentives for the politicisation of dynastic states and their further transformation into nation-states.

Peasant communities and urban groups which had traditional identities became political nations. These pr o- cesses had a universal all-European character, but the social speed and paces of political and cultural transformations in the Greater Europe from Portugal to Georgia were uneven and different. The European peripheries embarked on the path of political transformation, dropped the shackles of tr a- dition and became political nations later than the states of the historical, political and economic hard core of Europe. The processes of tr ansformation of traditional groups into nations were extremely different, but the forms of these cultural changes and social mutations of archaic identities and communities in the modern ones were universal.

It is undeniable that institutions of identity and production of meanings and senses became two factors that nourished nationalisms (Gelneri, 2003; Smit'i, 2004; Hech'teri, 2007; Hobsbaumi, 2012; Amirgulashvili, 2013), inspired and stimulated nationalists to transform traditional communities into nations and forced dynastic states to change and become nation states.

The first thing that has to be said is the following: intellectuals played special or leading roles always and everywhere in the history of n a- tionalisms and political parties that were ambitious enough to change the status of a physical geographical territory to a more prestigious status of cultural, political or economic regions or states. These new states belong to a number of dynamically changing, transforming and nationalizing societies, despite the fact that they could have developed political and state traditions in the past. Such states, which were parts of multinational empires or multi-component non-democratic states, tend to transform ethnic nations into political nations and modernise formal states in nation-states. The role of intellectual communities in these societies is obvious and it is impossible and senseless to ignore it. Georgia is one of those post-Soviet and postauthoritarian states where intellectuals play a significant role in the functioning of the actual political regime and its legitimating.

The purpose and objectives of the article, or what is this article about? Analysis of traditional institutionalised forms of generation of ident i- ties and national meanings, including academic institutions, is the main purpose of this article. Analysis of the institutions of identity as the imagined factories where intellectuals invented political traditions and generated meanings is the main task of this article. The author also analyses the role of intellectuals as the main generators of meanings because they propose political invented traditions and legitimise nations and states they live in.

Structurally, the article consists of two large sections. The author analyses the main traditional institutions and their tactics of the invention of political traditions, including the geographical imagination in the first part of the article. The author analyses the roles, statuses, tactics, and strategies of the Georgian intellectual community in the second part of the article, presuming that intellectuals are responsible for the invention of traditions and their national meanings.

The author will analyse the role of Georgian intelligentsia and intellectual communities in the political life of Georgia. The author presumes that intellectuals are important participants in the political processes, but their roles and historical significance are in the shadow of other more topical subjects of modern Georgian political history. Analysis of institutions and the production of meanings of identity is the main objective of this article.

The author will try to analyse how the institutions of identity legit i- mize the nationalistic political project in Georgia. The author will also an a- lyse how Georgian intellectuals involved in numerous processes and forms of invention, imagination, and production of meanings formulate political and cultural spaces, integrating them into the standardized and unified canons of national identity. Therefore, this article has several tasks in addition to the main one mentioned above. The tasks of this article are as follows: analysis of the forms of political activity of Georgian intellectuals; the study of fragmentation of the Georgian intellectual community; analysis of the role and significance of intellectuals in the development of Georgian identity and political nation.

Georgian intellectuals as hostages of modernization

The dynamic rise and historical success of institutions of identity and the production of meanings and senses stimulated political, social, cultural and intellectual changes and transformations in Georgian society. Intellectuals who imagined and invented identities strive to do it because they wanted to actualize the features of the community they belonged to, and to prove that they are radically different from other ones. One of the Georgian intellectuals of the period of the First Republic tried to fix this component in the national identity and argued that “our sharp subjectivism is unknown to the Russians. The ancient Slavs, as historians claim, cut off the heads of

their victorious commanders: they could not accept the individuality that towered above the middle level. The propensity to monotony became the characteristic feature of the Russians... We will never reconcile ourselves with this kind of egalitarianism and centralism... our neighbours do not accept our subjectivism. Therefore, spiritually, we will always remain strangers to one another” (Kikodze, 1919).

The academic community, in general, tends to believe that European nationalisms generated their own institutions for the reproduction of ident i- ty, and intellectuals endowed them with meanings and new senses that l e- gitimised the nations and national states of their dreams. Institutions of identity were extremely diverse. In fact, the intellectual, cultural and social practices of nationalists were attempts to invent, imagine and produce meanings for legitimating and glorification of nationalisms and all these efforts of nationalists were their impacts to legitimate nations they belong to or dreamed about. Secondary school, universities, public and private media, political parties, folklore organisations, choirs, ensembles, ethn o- graphic societies, cultural communities, and associations became social and political institutions that monopolised functions of imagination, invention and reproduction of political and ethnical identities for national or dynam i- cally nationalizing states. The intellectuals involved in the activities of these institutions formed, imagined, invented and constructed the identity of the nation and the Georgians were not excluded from this politically universal and historically inevitable logic of modernizations and transformations of archaic and traditional communities into modern nations.

It is clear from these observations that Georgian nationalism and Georgian nation (Zedania, 2009; Kakitelashvili, 2012) did not become exceptions from this universal logic of the development of nationalism, the invention of nations as imagined communities and invented traditions. The modern Georgian nation became a political and civil nation later than other European nations. The Soviet political experiment became a powerful stimulus for the transformation of traditional communities into a nation with political and state attributes. The forced Soviet modernization tran sformed traditional and archaic communities radically and decisively, forced them to change and become a political Georgian nation. Soviet modernization provided Georgians with the necessary institutions of identity, including the secondary school, universities, state media, folklore organisations, choirs, ensembles, ethnographic societies, and cultural associations. Political parties and independent media as institutions of identity emerged in the post-Soviet period. National history and literature, which also became invented traditions, arose in the pre-Soviet era, but Georgian intellectuals rewrote and reimagined them several times in the 20th century and these institutions of identity were less stable because they depended on political situations and ideological conjunctures. Georgian intellectuals involved in the activities of these institutions which imagine and invent Georgian n a- tion and provide it with symbolic and real political and cultural meanings became historically necessary captives who victimised themselves in their individual and collective attempts to legitimise the fact of the historical existence of the nation they belong to.

Secondary school and universities are primary institutions that form and reproduce identity simultaneously. Schools and universities, as social institutions, unlike intellectual communities, do not generate new senses and meanings of identity; they only translate and reproduce identities suggested by the intellectuals. The school and universities in Georgia are important links in preservation, reproduction, and broadcasting of the national Georgian identity. The school became the primary institution that is r e- sponsible for the formation of national identity and the transformation of children into citizens with political and national identity. Georgian history, literature, and language belong to the number of subjects with the systemic importance for the formation and reproduction of national identity. Studies of history are extremely important in the context of methodological and theoretical changes in the main approaches Georgian intellectuals used and practised since the critical moment when Georgia regained its political and state independence. The theoretical and methodological approaches in studies of national literature also changed. Humanities were nationalised at the secondary and higher schools of independent Georgia. These processes ac- tualised their instrumentalist and servilist roles and purposes of knowledge in the dynamically nationalizing societies. Georgian universities (gurgen i- dze, 1988; metreveli, 1998; metreveli, 1996; jorbenadze, 1988; tadzari, 2000; metreveli, 2003; jorbenadze, 1968) in general and their humanitarian departments in particular, including historical and philological faculties, engage in the collective realisation of the servilist duties and are less r e- sponsible than the secondary school. Georgian university intellectuals as heirs of the old Soviet Georgian national intelligentsia and part of heterogeneous European intellectual communities simultaneously prefer to invent, imagine and offer meanings, when the secondary school simplifies and uses them for the socialisation and nationalisation of new generations of Georgian citizens.

Georgian intellectuals as prisoners of formal academic institutions

The old academic institutions that form Georgian National Academy of Sciences became the traditional social and cultural places of residence

for the old Georgian intelligentsia. These institutions are involved in the production of identity and the invention of national meanings, but representatives of the traditional Georgian intelligentsia prefer to invent meanings in an archaic way and use traditional forms for the promotion of new senses of identity. Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature and Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts are two iconic, typical and symbolically important academic institutions that produce a traditional model of academic historical knowledge and generate new meanings of the national Georgian identity simultaneously. Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature with its outdated and archaic site belongs to the post-Soviet or even neo-Soviet academic institutions that became reservations for representatives of the older generation of Georgian intelligentsia. Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature as other state scientific organisations “produce” academic knowledge in its traditional and almost positivist understanding.

The subjects and directions of the academic activities in the Institute are traditional, and most of them are focused on the history of Georgian literature in its eventual or personified contexts. Georgian intellectuals from Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature participate in production of meanings but prefer to do it archaically because they imagine the positivist grand narratives. Synthetic versions of the history of Georgian literature, Shota Rustaveli Institute propose, are eventual and linear in their inner logic because they combine medieval traditions, realistic classics, modernity, the Soviet period and contemporary epoch. Attempts to localise the legacy of the literature of Georgian emigration does not change this harmonious scheme radically.

Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts also participates in the invention of meanings but prefers to do it differently than other traditional academic institutions. Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts is more active than other academic institutions in its attempts to use contemporary means of commun i- cation. Kekelidze Centre has its own pages on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube channel. Korneli Kekelidze Centre plays an instrumentalist role and actualises the ancient and Kartvelian ethnic character of Georgian identity. The social and cultural roles of the Centre have much in common with the functions of the Armenian Matenadaran. The Centre visualises symbolic and sacred dimensions and levels of Georgian identity. Traditional texts and manuscripts became the raw mat erial for the invention of the modern nation and new forms, senses, and meanings of national identity. The Centre is successful in its attempts to find a place for a medieval heritage in the modern world, and localise it in the invented ethnocentric national identity. Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts attempts to instrumentalise identity and ac- tualise the potential of the ancient ethnic cultural, linguistic and literary heritage in the post-modern contexts. Other projects of Georgian academic institutions have the same tasks in the contexts of imagination and invention of identity, and in production of meanings and senses. The Rustaveli Committee focus on preservation and analysis of Shota Rustaveli's legacy and heritage. Traditional academic institutions and centres imagine and invent the meanings of identity in their modern understandings and attempt to modernise and integrate the archaic, ethnic and Kartvelian origins and foundations of Georgian nation in the heterogeneous and numerous contexts of the globalizing world.

Georgian intellectual community (Dzigua, 2009; Makharadze, 1997; Maghlap'eridze, 2005) is a more important institution of identity which is responsible for the production of meanings. The problems of definition of nature and status of the thinking minority or intellectual class in Georgia are extremely controversial. The thinking class of the Soviet period was known as intelligentsia. The Georgian national intelligentsia, on the one hand, as their counterparts in other post-Soviet countries suffered very much during the transition period and became victims of social and economic marginalization (Barbak'adze, 2010). On the other hand, part of the intelligentsia was able to adapt and became intellectual communities. Contemporary Georgian intellectual communities are not familiar with the concepts of unity and unanimity in their Soviet radical understandings. Therefore, the intellectual spaces of contemporary Georgia are too fragmented. The pro-Western and pro-European part of the old Soviet Georgian intelligentsia, which latently and secretly cultivated European identities and ideas during the Soviet period, was able to adapt to contemporary realities successfully and became part of Georgian intellectual communities. This segment of Georgian intellectual space is responsible for the genesis, imagination, invention, and production of national senses and meanings. These Georgian intellectuals rewrote the old Soviet versions of history because the dominance of communist ideology and the class approach ceased to satisfy them. Georgian intellectuals rejected the old versions, tactics, and strategies of the national history writing and replaced them with new ones rooted in ethnocentrism. Georgian intellectuals proposed a new national pantheon of the founding fathers of the nation, rejected the old Soviet h eroes and replaced them with new and `more national' images, including representatives of Georgian emigration and activists of the national anticommunist and anti-Soviet movement.

Institutes of identity in contemporary Georgia are represented by institutions in the traditional sense as institutionalised organisations and institutions as processes that significantly influence the basic trajectories and directions of identity development simultaneously. These processes of identity, including clericalisation and secularisation, are mutually exclusive, but present-time Georgia exists and develops in the contexts of these two trends. The intellectual communities of Georgia are actively responding to threats of clericalisation and secularisation. Secularisation in Georgia as in other peripheral regions of Europe developed more slowly than in the central regions of Europe. The role of the Orthodox Church in Georgia was comparable to the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland, Lithuania or Spain. Therefore, the starting conditions for secularisation were extremely negative because Georgian society was traditional. Secularisation was the result of a coercive policy of modernization initiated by the Bolsheviks who `sovietised' Georgia. Despite all attempts of atheisation and forced secularisation of Georgia during the Soviet period, Georgia was among those Soviet republics where the role of church and religion in social and cultural life was more significant and visible than in other republics. Religion and the church collective heroes of Georgian Soviet culture and literature. Georgia was among those republics where local authorities destroyed churches and temples less actively than the authorities of other regions. Therefore, Georgian society was more religious than the societies of other Soviet republics. Georgia, in this cultural and intellectual situation, was more prepared for the religious revival and radical clericalisation of society and culture that prevailed in Georgia after the republic restored state and political independence and sovereignty. The restoration of Georgian political independence became an incentive for the clericalisation of society. It did not exclude the cessation and further development of secular political and intellectual trends in cultural evolution. Georgian liberal intellectuals who believe that the Orthodox Church is dead and not ready to debate and discuss certain items with society (khvich'ia, iago. personaluri snobi....; urushadze, ilia; badoiani, norik..) became the main critics of the Orthodox Church as the initiator of the archaization and clericalization of society.

The period of Mikheil Saakashvili became the golden age in actual Georgian history for pro-American oriented liberals who promoted the project of resolute Westernisation and democratisation. They also reinforced the secular foundations of contemporary Georgian statehood. The assertions that Georgian intellectual communities are very heterogeneous and fragmented became common place in historiography, but the political preferences of Georgian intellectuals predetermined these internal schisms. Giorgi Maisuradze (maisuradze, giorgi. polarisats'ia...) presumes that Georgian society has much in common with Italian because the left minor i- ty supports leftist ideas and prefers to criticise the church as too archaic and traditional institution. Criticism of the Orthodox Church in the 2000s was not a criticism of Orthodoxy in particular; opponents of the church pr e- ferred to actualise its traditional and archaic character in general. Ther efore, Georgian intellectuals in modern Georgia fluctuate between the poles of clericalisation and secularisation continuously and constantly. The Orthodox Church became an important factor in cultural, social and political life of contemporary Georgia, and Church hierarchs b ecame media figures also. The clericalisation of cultural and social life became a very controversial process in Georgia because Georgian intellectuals failed in their collective attempts to create a consolidated community. The Georgian church reacted to the weakness and indecisiveness of secular intellectual communities promptly and actively. Hierarchs and representatives of the Church realised and understood that secular society could not overcome the traumas of post-communist transformations. They decided to show initiative and proposed an alternative path of development that excluded the achievements and successes of modernization and secularization. On the one hand, Georgian intellectuals are far from the total unification of their opinions. On the other hand, Georgian intellectuals are dependent on ideological conjuncture and influence of political elites. Georgian intellectuals prefer to compare their ideas with the positions of the authorities and ruling political elites.

Therefore, Georgian intellectuals are very fearful and dependent on external influences and controls, including financial dependence on the state (beriashvili, levan. sakhelmtsip'o kapitalizmi.) which continues to be the main sponsor of the formalised Georgian national culture. Georgi an intellectual discourse develops as heterogeneous, and attempts to transplant Western approaches, and popularise the heritage of European philosophy of the 20th century (Elizbarashvili, 2012; T'inikashvili, 2012; Berekashvili, 2012; Elizbarashvili, 2014) will coexist with formal and imitative practices of representatives of the old Georgian intelligentsia from traditional academic institutions. New and old Georgian intellectuals participate in the processes of reproduction and imagination of meanings equally, but the projects of identity and nation invented by them can be diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Georgian society reacted several times to social and religious challenges in the 1990s and the 2010s, but the reactions of the church and the intellectual community were diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. If the Church became the source of archaization and clericalization of society because it defended traditional values consistently and condemned the representatives of sexual minorities strongly, then the intellectual communities which were heterogeneous and their social and cultural reactions were also extremely diverse. Despite the amorphism of the modern Georgian intellectual community, intellectuals tried to resist the tendency of the clericalization of Georgian society occasionally.

Zaza Burchuladze's novel “Inflatable Angel” (Burchuladze, 2011) b e- came an attempt of the Georgian society to react to mutually exclusive tendencies of secularization and clericalization. The novel has something in common with Mikhail Bulgakov's “Master and Margarita”, but these similarities are formal only. Georgiyi Gurdjieff, as a representative of the early modern culture, who accidentally ended up in present -day Georgia where consumerism supplanted the national idea, became the main hero of the novel. The motives of postmodernism are combined with the images of a traditional archaic fairy tale and myth. Therefore, Foucault is no more than the dog's name and the local criminal authority rustles turns into a semiliving wooden folk sculpture, a local saint and healer. The novel became an important impact on the development of the invented traditions of Georgian identity in a post-modern society that lost its stable links with the traditional culture and social bases of the Georgian political nation. The novel actualised the folk archaic traditions and tendencies of the rising consumer society simultaneously. georgia intelligentsia intellectual nation

The novel was an attempt to revise the traditional foundations of the Georgian political and national identity, the role of faith and religion in the development of the Georgian national consciousness. If Gia Nodia stated timidly that he does not understand why Konstantine Gamsakhurdia has the reputation of the greatest Georgian writer, then Zaza Burchuladze (Kharbedia, 2012; Vanishvili, 2011) turns the foundations of the Georgian identity upside down: a bandit and a robber with the name of the Georgian academic-philologist Chikobava becomes an Orthodox saint and a righteous man in one of his novels. Other heroes have the names of the best representatives of Georgian intelligentsia of the 20th century also, but no one understands them and does not feel connections and links with the historical forms of Georgian identity. The novel has a revolutionary character in the context of attempts to question the religious Orthodox roots and the backgrounds of the Georgian identity. The novel actualised its revolutionary message in a transit society where part of the society retains its religious preferences when other segments were involved in secularisation processes, and the intelligentsia could not adequately meet the challenges of secularization and the threats of clericalization.

The novel became a symbolic proof of the fact that Georgian identity is a political, social and cultural construct because the author actually revisited, imagined and invented Georgian identity again. Zaza Burchuladze actually cut out Georgian classics from their traditional cultural and social landscapes, including school textbooks and synthetic versions of the history of Georgian literature. Zaza Burchuladze dismantled archaic ideas about the history of Georgian literature, the pantheon of classics and founding fathers, replaced them with a collection of oddities and anecdotes about the adventures of the Georgian from the past in the post-contemporary Tbilisi. The novel became an attempt to invent territorial forms and dimensions of Georgian identity because Tbilisi appears as an invented tradition and a collective hero in the text simultaneously. The novel was an attempt to overcome the carnival traditions in Georgian culture because Zaza Bur- chuladze attempted to deconstruct collective and individual faith in a miracle, but Georgian society was not ready to break with its past and faith in the golden age and national utopia finally and decisively.

Actually, the novel became a literary fiction and it has nothing in common with Georgian cultural, political and everyday realities, but the text can be imagined as real because Georgian society exists and develops as a society of invented traditions. Therefore, reading a novel does not stimulate the complexity of readers who perceive it as another invented tradition. Despite the desire to part with the carnival and laughing culture as the form of Georgian identity Zaza Burchuladze, on the one hand, actually plays different forms of Georgian identity by himself. On the other hand, Zaza Burchuladze, in spite of his attempts to actualise new tendencies in the invented traditions of Georgian identity, does not offer anything fundamentally new because he does not imagine the new golden age of anational ethnic and romantic utopia. Zaza Burchuladze ruthlessly throws his protagonists into the world of new post-national invented traditions where the market monopolised statuses and roles of the invented traditions and mutated into the object of collective worship with elements of madness.

The novel genetically relates to other texts of Georgian literature that became classical ones because Zaza Burchuladze continued to invent and imagine new political traditions. The novel became a deconstruction novel because its author deconstructed the classical myths of Georgian identity as invented traditions that became archaic and could not resist new competitors anymore, but the deconstruction of archaic invented traditions inspired Zaza Burchuladze to invent new political traditions. Literature as an invented tradition in this context inevitably actualises its functions as another imagined factory of identity that reproduces new meanings and senses for old and even archaic political and social institutions. Actually, Zaza Burchuladze's successful literary experiment proved that the Georgian identity and Georgian literature as a frequent case of its development was imagined by Georgian intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries as an invented tradition. The novel became, in these intellectual contexts, another Georgian attempt to invent tradition in literature and to reconcile traditional and modern, archaic and secular trends in Georgian identity.

Georgian intellectuals as hostages of space and servants of the national body

The institutions of identity in contemporary Georgia are extremely diverse. The intellectual communities and these institutions including the traditional institutions of institutionalised groups (parties, media, academic organisations) are responsible for the production, reproduction, and gener a- tion of new national senses and meanings.

Geographical spaces in the modern globalizing world ceased to be objects of physical geography only and exclusively. Intellectuals are responsible for the actualisation of new meanings of spaces in contexts of the development of identity and the idea of a political nation. Intellectuals imagine nations and invent the landscapes they exist in simultaneously.

The nationalized spaces and imagined nations as also invented traditions form an indissoluble unity. Georgian intellectuals did not become an exception to the universal logic of the development of nationalisti c imagination and did a lot to transform Georgia into an ideal and idealised hom eland. Intellectuals imagined physical geographical spaces as the sacred body of the nation. Historically arisen regions with their physical geographical features were imagined as parts of the sacred and indivisible spatial body of Georgian political nation. According to some experts, the modern political body of Georgian nation in spatial and territorial dimensions includes Adjara or acharis avtonomiuri respublika (the Autonomous Republic of Adjara), Guria, Imereti, Kakheti, Mtskheta-Mtianeti, Racha- Lechkhumi and Kvemo-Svaneti, Samegrelo and Zemo-Svaneti, Samtskhe- Javakheti, Kvemo-Kartli, and Shida Kartli. Modern regions of Georgia became imagined and invented constructs. Therefore, nationalist intellectuals imagining the historical forms of Georgian statehood try to prove and actu- alise the continuous character of the development of political institutions and the continuity between different regionalised and even localised forms of Georgian statehood. Actually, these intellectual practices became attempts to impart new meanings to Georgian political space as a constantly functioning factory of production and reproduction of meanings and senses.

Therefore, samts'khe-saat'abago (XIV-XVI), k'art'lis samep'o (the Kartlian Kingdom, 1484 - 1801), kakhet'is samep'o (Kakheti Kingdom), imeret'is samep'o (the Imeretian Kingdom, XV - 1811), guriis samt'avro (Gurian Principality, XIV - 1828) (Lort'k'ip'anidze, 1994; Sudadze, 1998; Kozhoridze, 1987; Rekhviashvili, 1989; Rekhviashvili, 1976; Khomeriki, 2012; Ch'khataraishvili, 1985) became collective places of remembrance and geographic invented traditions that form the political body of Georgian nation. These regions emerge as the intellectual and cultural constructs, intellectual attempts to overcome the isolation of physical geography and to propose a new version of political geography of the ideal homeland where each region is part of a symbolic and sacred body of a political nation. Therefore, Georgian intellectuals construct the history of Georgia as a single Kartvelian state and, on the other hand, imagine and invent regional dimensions of Georgian history actively and simultaneously. Actually, these intellectual and cultural practices became attempts to impart new cultural and political meanings to physical geographical spaces.

Regions of Adjara, Guria, Imereti, Kakheti, Mtskheta-Mtianeti, Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti, Samegrelo and Zemo Svaneti, Samtskhe-Javakheti, Kvemo Kartli, and Shida Kartli constitute the administrative structure of modern Georgia, but we should also point out the fact that the political body of Georgian nation lost its unity in the 1990s. The forms of legitimation of the state and the nation change more slowly than the nations and states themselves, they live in, and their intellectuals imagine and invent for needs of political elites. Modern Georgia inherited and received archaic forms of organisation of political space. Collective repr e- sentations of intellectuals about space are also obsolete because they are rooted in traditional versions of legitimisation. Traditional forms of imagination, invention, and legitimating of the Georgian space as a fortress, where the body of a political nation lives in, change more slowly than space itself. Georgian intellectuals are partly responsible for this because they prefer to use positivistic and ethnocentric models of the imagination of the political territories of Georgian nation.

We cannot ignore the fact that the loss of the territorial integrity of Georgian national spatial body stimulates numerous political traumas of modern Georgian intellectual community and forces intellectuals to pr o- duce and reproduce meanings and reinvent political and ideological myths actively and simultaneously. Georgia has lost control over two regions in the 1990s, but Georgian intellectuals had time to imagine and invent them as historically Georgian and integrated them into the sacred body of the Georgian political nation. Adzharia and South Ossetia became these two regions, which form the problematic and sick parts of Georgian political body. Definition of samkhret ' oset 'is respublika (Republic of South Ossetia) is completely alien to the Georgian political consciousness and Georgian identity because it made doubtful the central idea of unity and indivisibility of the Georgian political space.

Therefore, Georgian elites, on the one hand, prefer to divide these areas into the other parts of Georgian political and national space, including Shida Kartli, Mtskheta-Mtianeti, Imereti and Racha-Lechkhumi and Zemo Svaneti. On the other hand, the concepts of qop'ili samkhret' oset'is avtonomiuri olk'i (“the former South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast”) and ts'khinvalis regioni (Tskhinvali region) are in active political and public use.

Some Georgian intellectuals use the term samach 'ablo in their attempts to construct Georgian images and collective ideas about South O s- setia. In August 2008 Georgian elites tried to solve the problem of Ossetian separatism radically and restore the unity of the political body of Georgian nation in spatial and administrative dimensions, but Russian interference into the conflict led to the institutionalisation of the break and separation of South Ossetia from the political body of Georgian nation. Georgian intellectuals imagine the events of 2008 as ruset'-sak'art'velos omi or the Russian-Georgian war. The war of 2008 became a serious psychological trauma for Georgian political elites and intellectual communities.

The memory of the war stimulates political imagination and invention of new political traditions, including sak'art'velos kanoni okupirebuli teri- toriebis shesakheb or “The occupied territories law”. Ap 'khazet 'is avtonomiuri respublika or the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia is the second problematic part of the spatial body of Georgian political nation. Actually, Tbilisi lost control of this region in the 1990s; the military conflict of 2008 institutionalised the destruction of the unity of the political body of the Georgian nation because the Russian Federation recognised the indepen d- ence of the rebelling regions, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but the Georgian political and intellectual elites are united in their solidarity not to recognise this fact because they prefer to ignore the loss of two regions. Therefore, official Tbilisi does not recognise the government of Sukhumi as legitimate and insists that the Government of ap'khazet'is avtonomiuri respublikis mt'avroba or the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia in Exile is the only legitimate body of state power.

The Constitution of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia defines Abkhazia as the autonomous part of Georgia [ap'khazet'is avtonomiuri...]. Tbilisi did not reconcile itself to the actual loss of control over the territory of Abkhazia but seeks to integrate it and bring it back to the political body and space of the Georgian political nation actively. The government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia in exile is a formalised institution that must imagine and invent Georgian images of Abkhazia, reproduce Georgian centric Abkhazian senses and integrate the region into the Georgian

Kartvelian cultural, political, social and economic contexts and spaces. Therefore, the Government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia promotes Kartvelian centred images of the region, including state symbols. Symbols became forms of visual representation of the political body of the nation and the geographical space of modern Georgian statehood. Official flag and coat of arms of the Government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia combines Georgian and Abkhazian motifs and images, but the first ones dominate and prevail clearly. This flag and coat of arms, recognised by the official Tbilisi and used by the government in exile, became an attempt of symbolic reunification and the return of Abkhazia to the Georgian political space.

Georgian intellectuals as hostages of their historical heritage

Various intellectual groups which became the soil for the formation and progress of the national intelligentsia, arose in Georgia in the 19th century. The Georgian intelligentsia of the 19th century was a breeding ground for the emergence and further rise and development of Georgian nationalism and the ideas of Georgian political and state independence. The history of Georgian intelligentsia in the 19th century had several features that significantly differentiate the social and cultural processes in Georgia from other European countries, including the states of the geographical peripheries. While in other European countries intellectual communities arose hi s- torically in wombs of the national bourgeoisie, the nobility and the traditional political aristocracy became the social groups that formed the nucl eus of the national intelligentsia in Georgia. By the beginning of the 20th- century Georgian intelligentsia was the leading group that defined the main trajectories and vectors of the development of nationalism.

The period of the Georgian Democratic Republic became a brief epoch of the rise and success of the national intelligentsia, but the `sovieti- sation' of Georgia and its transformation into Georgian SSR as part of the Soviet political space changed the general tendencies of the development of the Georgian intelligentsia substantially. The Georgian intelligentsia became a victim of `sovietisation', but Georgian intellectuals received significant preferences and benefits after they accepted official rules of political and cultural behaviour. The Georgian intelligentsia was forced to demonstrate loyalty to the communist regime, but Georgian intellectuals who lost their freedom, received social benefits and preferences instead. The Communist regime provided the intelligentsia with the monopoly rights of the formation of official canons of humanitarian knowledge. Therefore, Georgian intellectuals had no competitors when they wrote, imagined and invented the great and synthetic official versions of Georgian political history and the history of the Georgian language and literature, imagined as the two fundamental backgrounds of national identity.

The Soviet regime, despite its internal authoritarianism and the desire of Moscow elites to `russify' the national republics, allowed Georgian i n- tellectuals to transform and modernise Kartvelian groups into a Georgian political nation and develop it as an invented tradition. By the late 1980s, Georgian intellectuals made significant progress in the invention and imagination of Georgian nation in its political and ethnic dimensions. The institutionalisation of the nation and nationalists as a social and cultural class became the most important achievements of Georgian intellectual communities. The Georgian intelligentsia was able to imagine the nation as a political class, providing it with the necessary political, cultural and social virtues. The intellectual community in Georgian SSR became the arena of confrontation and struggle between the two most significant and influential political doctrines and ideologies of the 20th century. The principles of the class confronted the values of the nation and Georgia was one of the many arenas of this struggle.

Nationalism proved to be a more adaptive political force and ideology. Nationalism became the sphere where the communist idea was defeated in competition with the inevitable attraction and fascination of the national language, historical myths, and collective beliefs that nation is more natural, normal and inevitable than the ideological and political projects of communism. If Russian nationalists in the USSR turned out to be political marginals and losers who could not resist the universal temptations of communist ideology because the values of the class defeated the principles of the nation, Georgian nationalists were more successful because they were able to turn national values into the fundamental principles of political life in the Sovietised Georgia.

Georgian intelligentsia became an influential and stable group by the time the Soviet Union became the victim of an internal crisis that launched a mechanism of its disintegration. Georgian intelligentsia in independent Georgia became free but it lost its internal unity because the intelligentsia transformed into several different intellectual communities. The processes of political democratisation and economic liberalisation forced Georgian intellectuals to become public intellectuals because the closed model of the Soviet intelligentsia became ineffective in independent Georgia. The processes of transition from authoritarianism to democracy actualised simultaneously three functions of intellectuals that were absolutely alien to the Soviet Georgian intelligentsia. These functions include public role, responsibility of intellectuals and - betrayal of intellectuals. Modernity changed radically the social and cultural roles, functions and purposes of intellectuals because the hypostasis of an intellectual as an expert marginalized the functions of an intellectual as a prophet. Democratisation and liberalisation transformed former Soviet intellectuals from the cabinet and academic scientists into public and media figures. Involvement in political processes ac- tualised responsibility of representatives of the intellectual community, especially those who became part of the ruling political elites. Political dynamics and instability, heterogeneous nature of Georgian society, ethnic conflicts and wars forced intellectuals to become traitors and collaborators who cooperate with elites and change their political backers.

The Georgian Soviet intelligentsia had every chance to become an active political class in the late 1980s and early 1990s despite the fact that it differed little from other formally national and in fact Sovietised intellectuals in the union republics because, as Nino Pirtskhalava presumes, “the Georgian intelligentsia as a certain social, external quantitative phenomenon in its structure, internal and external organisation corresponded to the Soviet model” (Pirtskhalava, 1997). The late Soviet and early post-Soviet Georgia belonged to those countries where the intellectuals from academic institutions gained control over the authorities, but this was only an ideali s- tic illusion because the former communist party bureaucracy used all available resources to remove these romantic nationalists from power. Zviad Gamsakhurdia (Gamsakhurdia, 1990; Gamsakhurdia, 2000) as Gbulfoz Elgiboy in Azerbaijan, Levon Ter-Petrosyan in Armenia and Vladislav Ar- dzinba in pseudo-state of Abkhazia could not use and control political power effectively and ceded it to formal professional politicians who r e- ceived state experience in the Soviet period.

Russian critic and philosopher Gasan Guseinov (Guseinov, 2012) pr e- sumes that intellectuals who control political power can be dangerous t o society, but intellectuals in national or dynamically nationalizing states always become faithful servants, representatives, political agents, and the mouthpieces of the nation they belong to, or imagine and invent actively. The advent of nationalist-minded intellectuals into power in the early 1990s was the result of historical and cultural features of the development of the local political class in general and Georgian nationalism in particular. The Soviet regime toughly, cruelly and decisively tamed Georgian intelligentsia and deprived it of opportunities to influence the decisions of the authorities. Georgian writers realised the danger of the passivity of the intelligentsia in the 1930s.