ABSTRACT
There was no immediate resurgence for the Georgian novel after the death of Stalin and the execution of Beria. De-Stalinization and the ‘thaw’ were a liberating force only in Russia and the Slavonic republics of the USSR; Khrushchev’s famous speech of 1956 to the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party had tragic consequences in Tbilisi. In the same year the statue of Stalin was pulled down: crowds of students and ordinary townspeople came to protest at what they perceived as an act of Russian chauvinism, not so much the dethronement of a tyrant, as a desecration of their culture and language. The demonstration grew rowdy; someone tore down and publicly defecated on a portrait of one of the leading ‘reformist’ Communists, Anastas Mikoyan; at this point a KGB unit opened fire, and hundreds of Georgia’s young intellectuals were slaughtered in a hail of bullets. The government of Mzhavanadze, whom Khrushchev installed as his ‘viceroy’ in Tbilisi, was determinedly anti-intellectual: writers, artists, and actors were kept out of his circle of influence and ousted from key posts, such as the directorate of theatres or editorship of journals. The new party circles had no ideology except obedience to Moscow, and connivance with the criminal underworld. In Moscow, where Khrushchev engaged in dialogue with Russian writers, encouraging Tvardovsky and his journal Novy Mir, tolerating the cult of Anna Akhmatova, using Solzhenitsyn as a battering-ram against the party establishment, literature was in ferment, even if the old intolerance reared its head in the vicious persecution of Pasternak. But in Georgia no such dialogue took place between Mzhavanadze and Georgian intellectuals. Literary ferment could be found only in the bold Russian-language monthly Literaturnaia Gruziia, founded in 1957: but its most adventurous publications in the 1960s, under the editorship of Mikheil Mrevlishvili, were about Russian, not Georgian, writers in Georgia — Giorgi Margvelashvili’s daring publication of poems by Mandelstam and letters by Pasternak to Georgian friends marked new departures in Soviet literature and were, presumably, underwritten in Moscow, not Tbilisi.
