Journey outward: Ilia Chavchavadze walking within the Russian empire

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This and next paragraphs explaining a historical context relies on my reading of the History of Georgia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Merab Vachnadze and Vakhtang Guruli (2003, 4–58).

2 The term “Orientalist” refers to Edward Said’s narrative of Western Orientalism. In his influential work Orientalism (1978) Said explains the political implications of representations and aesthetics and condemns those Western academic and artistic practices which, for their self-definition, misrepresent or under-represent non-Western peoples, cultures, and history.

3 References to Letters of a Traveller in English are to Marjory and Olivier Wardrops’ translation of Ilia Chavchavadze’s works from Georgian into English. References are to chapters.

4 The novel of 1842 Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, regarded as a major text of the nineteenth-century Russian literature, depicts a journey through the tsarist Empire.

5 Demon (1829-1839), a poem by the Russian Romantic poet and writer Lermontov, is set in the mountains of the Caucasus in the 1830s.

6 Griboyedov was a Russian poet, playwright, and diplomat, who travelled and produced letters and travel notes about the Caucasus before Ilia Chavchavadze.

7 This line is reminiscent of Odysseus’ words in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, “in his longing to see were it but the smoke leaping up from his own land, yearns to die” (song 1, lines 56–58).

8 The Mokhevs are Georgian highlanders who live close to the Russian-Georgian border. The Georgian military road is located right next to their land Khevi.

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Tamar Barbakadze

Tamar Barbakadze is the SNSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Literary Studies, University of Quebec in Montreal. She holds a PhD in French and Comparative Literature from the University of Lausanne, and a joint master’s degree in European Literary Cultures at the University of Bologna and the University of Upper Alsace. Her doctoral thesis explored the notions of time, memory, and perception in Catherine Colomb’s, Marcel Proust’s and Virginia Woolf’s writings. Her publications have appeared in Classiques Garnier, Journal of Gender Studies, Peter Lang, EPURE (Reims), and in European Comparative Literature Association (ECLA) and British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) publication series. She is an author of the monograph Catherine Colomb’s Vision of Time: In Dialogue with Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf (Peter Lang, 2022). Her current research focuses on the questions of decolonization, indigeneity and ecology in literary studies.