La mer Noire : espace littéraire versus espace politique
The Black Sea: a literary versus a political space

Author(s): Atinati Mamatsashvili
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Georgian literature
Published by: Сдружение „Транспонтика“
Keywords: Black Sea; Georgian literature; Soviet regime; ideology; René Magritte
Summary/Abstract: In our study we are focusing on the texts (poetry and novels) of Georgian writers in which the Black Sea seems to appropriate its own historicity to the point of creating a literary space versus an ideologised political space. In this sense, this literary space, opposed to the really existent geographical one, becomes a place of resistance to the Soviet regime. A politically strategic place, a place of invasion and Bolshevik occupation, the Black Sea embodies an identity and national marker simultaneously. The sea is an integral part of the poetry of Galaktion Tabidze (1891-1959). Used sometimes in its metaphorical function, in most of texts composed in the 1930s and 1940s the poet does name the Black Sea, concretised by its geographical location in the Ajara region, which is also emphasised. In Nodar Dumbadze’s story, Hellados, the Black Sea is always a strong identity marker whose crossing can cause death. To traverse the Black Sea means to leave the homeland that appears as one true homeland to which everything is connected – home, friends, memory. It is in the Black Sea that the Greek protagonist – born and raised in Sokhoumi, a port city on the Black Sea, – will die. Thus, the action relating to the Black Sea is often, in literary texts, part of a struggle between the New and the Old World, between the Bolshevik occupation and resistance (individual or collective), between life and death. Hence, on the example of two authors – Dumbadze and G. Tabidze – we are going to inquire into the status of the Black Sea as a (national) literary space or, in other words, a space of resistance to the ideology of Soviet domination. A pictorial analysis of the Magrittian painting The Human Condition (1935), which plays on the illusion between the “real” sea and the sea-image at the same time integrated in and detached from this reality, will allow us to establish a parallel between the really existing Black Sea and the one which is created within the literary space.

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