ABSTRACT
One of the attractions of the park surrounding the Villa Borghese in Rome is a group of statues of national poets. Included among them are such obvious examples as the Persian Abulqasim Firdowsi, author of the Shahnâmeh or Book of Kings; the Georgian Shota Rustaveli, who wrote The Man in the Panther Skin (Vepkhistqaosani); and the Montenegran Petar Njegos, writer of The Mountain Wreath (Gorski Vijenac). More surprising, however, is the presence of a statue, unveiled in 2012, of the ‘Azerbaijani poet’ Nizami Genjewi. Nizami composed all of his poems in Persian, but now he is claimed as the national poet of a country that cultivates an Azeri Turkish rather than a Persian identity. This nationalist reappropriation of a classical poet points to some of the questions to be treated in the present paper: the rise of nationalist ideas in non-European contexts, in this case, the Soviet Caucasus; and the role of the humanities in the creation of these new nationalisms. As will appear below, it was a Georgian-born scholar, the famous linguist and archeologist Nikolaj Marr, who first claimed Nizami as an Azerbaijani poet. Marr will loom large in the following pages, not only in connection with his notorious Japhetic theory, but also in connection with early Soviet nationality policies.
