For the Reception of Romanticism in Georgian Symbolic Discourse

Abstract

The Georgian symbolist school itself was informationally presented as a variation of European school and identical to it by means of essence. This must also be considered as the cause of accusations by totalitarian ideology to modernists: that they were absolutely identical and imitated each other. Even general overview shows that despite their identical ideological-methodological choice the Georgian symbolist group members still were different from each other by creative status.
It is a fact that we must look for the origins of those extraordinary features in Georgian classic literature; naturally, the question if Georgian modernists had an ancestor in Georgian national artistic environment takes us to romanticism… The Georgian symbolists’ answer was ambiguous at that time and is the same today from literature critics.
As it was stressed the Georgian symbolist school itself was informationally presented as a variation of European school and absolutely identical to it by means of essence. This must also be considered as the cause of accusations by totalitarian ideology to modernists: that they were absolutely identical and imitated each other. Even general overview shows that despite their identical ideological-methodological choice the Georgian symbolist group members still were different from each other by creative status (considering orthodoxalism and traditionalism).
As it is known in culturological researches symbolism is also called “neo-romanticism”. Here we meet its historic and attitude relation with European romanticism schools’ traditions, although in Georgia the given attitude is different: as far as symbolism was not Georgian phenomenon and had a century distance from Georgian romantic school, their connection existed more on the level of historic memory. Georgian symbolists were also less aware of the base in creative ideology of Georgian romanticists. This explains their various attitudes to romantic poetry: they accepted only some of his poems and recognized only Nikoloz Baratashvili as representative of Georgian romanticism in general. Still, intercultural influences are apparent; world romanticism schools’ artists and their creative image-symbols became closer to Georgian symbolists, which even in dualist philosophy interpretation were recognized in Georgian theories of transcendentalism and spiritual unrest cultivation and in one of the main creative images of symbolic thinking – ideological perception of woman’s beauty and love.
If we speak about literature preamble of modernism ideology in Georgia we have to go through shorter chronology – only two decades in order to discuss Vazha Pshavela’s and Vasil Barnov’s creative biographies, as silhouettes of modernistic thinking are clearly seen in their artistic discourses.