Titsian Tabidze between Ovid and Jonah, Medea and the Psalmist, Scythia and Chaldea: Approaching the Decolonial Potential of Quasi-exile

Abstract

The present article explores ‘somewhere-else-ness’ (experiences of exile / stran­­­gerhood / misplacement) in the poetry of Titsian Tabidze. It departs from a ty­po­­logy of relevant experiences that goes beyond the limits of the Roman-European “world-system” and views Ovidiac exile as only one cultural archetype among seve­ral. It pays attention to the complicity between Pontic elegy represented by Ovid and, most notably from the perspective of Russian-Soviet decoloniality studies, Push­kin (on the one hand) and imperial violence (on the other hand), as well as to its over­load with self-extolment. It focusses on three groups of Titsian’s poems, to assess the weight of exilic/strangerhood archetypes in and across them: Ovidiac egocentric weep, Jonah’s (punishment for) desertion from God-ordained task, weep at the rivers of Babylon, and the strangerhood of a zealot among coreligionists (gharīb-hood). The relevance of preference for one or another archetype and of the reluctance to emb­race it to what with hindsight can be called a decolonial sensitivity and agenda is ex­plored. Decoloniality double impetus, as liberation from Russia-/Soviet – but also Europe-centrism, is discerned. I analyse three (of the) ‘Scythian elegies’ of Titsian, the 1927 “სკიфიის ელეგია” (‘Skifia’s elegy’), “სკვითური ელეგია: 5” (‘Scythian ele­­gies: 5’) and “ილაიალი” (‘I/iliali’), to show his fundamental reluctance to adopt an Ovidiac-Pushkinian stance, the entanglement in these poems of two archetypes (the Ovidiac and Jonah’s), and the presence in them of the sacred history perspective conveyed in the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse. I consider as especially mea­ningful the linguistic macaronism of the title of the first poem and the palindromic structure of the third one. I analyse an undated poem, ‘O Babylonians’, to discern the presence of the Psalm’s 136 (137) archetype in Titsian’s oeuvre, as well as its link to a biographically primeval exilic archetype (of Medea lost abroad) and to Titsian’s aspiration for a place in the literary canon. Therefore, I include the 1911 sonnet ‘Me­dea’ and the 1916 experimental sonnet ‘Pierrot’ in the analysis. Finally, I look at the ‘obverse side’ of Titsian’s reluctance to adopt Ovidiac-Pushkinian elegy: the spiritual domestication of select neighbouring countries (Daghestan and Armenia – as fun­damentally different from “Scythia”/Russia) and spiritual traditions associated with them, – focussing on the 1927 ‘Gunib’. Alongside analysis, the six poems are cited in full length, appended with their literal translations. The article is viewed as a pr­e­pa­ratory work in two directions: 1) disclosing and assessing the multi-layered and mul­ti-targeted decolonial potential of Titsian Tabidze’s oeuvre, 2) an interliterary explo­ra­tion of quasi-exilic experiences in the Black Sea region. Both prospective paths of research would lead to the demarcation of a crucial thematic pillar (one among no more than four) within a Black Sea Comparative Literature that is still to emerge, and to recognise the indispensability of Titsian Tabidze’s oeuvre to under­stand the cons­titutive geo-cultural and poetological tensions within the respective subject matter in the post-seventeenth-century regional modernity. On the impor­tant literature-his­torical juncture between early – individualist – modernism and non-individualist avant-garde / conservative post-symbolist modernism / socialist rea­lism, a number of lite­ra­tures were weary of eurocentrism, this being apparent in a new wave of en­chan­t­ment with an ‘East’ and in an embracing of non-mimetism. From a ‘Sovietologi­cal’ per­s­pective, this would imply that the historical scheme of an aborted moder­nism-and-westernism in the 1920s is a misleading simplification.