Does Snake Poison Work on Social Realism?

Abstract

In 1927, philosopher Serge Danelia published an article of criticism “Vazha-Pshavela and Georgian Nation,” in which he discussed the poet Vazha-Pshavela’s conception and representation of nature. Among the topics discussed in this article, Danelia’s interpretation of the poem “Snake Eater” is of particular interest to us. To answer a question of why the snake poison did not work on the protagonist Mindia as soon as he ate snake meat, he offers the explaination that the meat was boiled and so the effect of poison was slowed down. This interpretation, of course, strikes us as excessively realistic. Where did this attitude come from? How much does Danelia’s account reflect the tendency of social realism of that time?

Danelia thought that Vazha-Pshavela represented nature as an endless circle, as opposed to the historical process, which moves in the  direction of progress. Further, for Vazha, nature is not to be measured by the good and evil of the events that occur in nature, but by its beauty. In Vazha’s understanding, this beauty is woven into the fabric of nature itself and exists independent of human judgment. This conception of a transcendentally beautiful, ahistorical nature, Danelia claims, belongs to an Eastern, paganistic worldview, which he poses as an anthithesis to the Western, Christian conception of “history.” This criticism can be explained by dialectical materialism.

According to the scholar, Vazha’s representation of nature in “The Snake Eater” is fundamentally realist. The only reality that exists for the poet is indepentent nature. However, he criticizes, the poem also mixes a folktale into the realistic framework. Therefore, two different motifs, paganism and Christianity, are mixed in the work, which he regards as illogical; this destroys the any consistency in the poem’s plot line or framework. According to this argument, he rejected the poem and regarded it as a “weak” work. This is an inadequate and unsuccessful reading, even giving credit to the value of his dialectical materialist analysis of Vazha’s conception of nature.

Danelia’s criticism shows a forced application of the conventions of realism to “The Snake Eater”  supposedly, as demanded by the period  and, from this point of view, ignores or denies the magical element in the poem. However, today the concept of materialism again attracts our attention under the name of “new mate­rialism.” While his evaluation of the poem is flawed, a part of Danelia’s ar­gu­ment, in which he criticised the critic K’it’a Abashidze’s understanding of Vazha-Pshavela as a symbolist poet, is convincing and invites more careful discussion.