ქართული ვერსიისთვის გადადით ბმულზე.
On February 8, at 7 pm, the Institute for Social and Cultural Research will hold its next online colloquium. In the framework of the special working group “The Caucasus and the Imperial Matrix in the Long Nineteenth Century,” the colloquium will host Harsha Ram, Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
Russia’s First Anti-Imperialist Novel: Vasilii Narezhnyi’s The Black Year, or the Mountain Princes
Abstract:
The Russophone Ukrainian novelist Vasilii Narezhnyi (1780-1825) visited Tbilisi, Georgia in 1802, working for one year in the newly established Russian administration. In doing so he became entangled in one of the most pivotal moments in the modern history of the Caucasus: the Russian annexation of Kartli-Kakheti. Narezhnyi’s Caucasian sojourn would ultimately serve as the stimulus for his future novel Chernyi god, ili gorskie kniazia, most likely written in St. Petersburg during the 1810s but published only posthumously in 1829. The first sustained work of Russian literature to be set in the Caucasus, The Black Year unfolds in a small principality in North Ossetia during what appears to be the early modern era. The rambling account of a Caucasian princeling consumed by his quest to affirm, maintain or regain power, the novel was perceived as an attack on the very foundations of Russian autocracy and rejected for publication. When it was finally published, the novel was dismissed as artistically flawed and out of date. Untimely and never assimilated into the Russian literary canon, Narezhnyi’s book draws on diverse sources – from the Fürstenspiegel and the conte oriental to the folk traditions of the Ukrainian Baroque – to produce a grotesque yet enigmatic satire whose allegorization of sovereignty, both Russian and Caucasian, has yet to be fully understood.
Bio:
Harsha Ram’s first book, The Imperial Sublime (2003) addressed the relationship between poetic genre, aesthetic theory, territorial space and political power in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian, Russian-French and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernities. His current book-project, The Geopoetics of Sovereignty. Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter, seeks to provide a historical account of cultural relations between Georgian and Russian writers and intellectuals over the course of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on how the Georgia and the Caucasus region as a whole were mapped geopolitically as a contested territory and geopoetically as a space of natural and ethnolinguistic diversity.
The event will take place in English via Zoom. Registration is required.
To register please follow this link: https://bit.ly/3WyPCzp
