SUMMARY:

In Georgian literary history, Aleksandre Qazbegi (1848–1893) is notable for his formally innovative prose style as well as for the anticolonial themes that emerge from the seven years he passed among the mountaineers of Xevi. Drawing on ethnography to advance expressive possibilities that Mikhail Bakhtin considers specific to prose, Qazbegi’s literary aesthetic challenged prior poetic norms, while crafting new alignments between vernacular realism and prosaic form. This essay examines the conjunctures of ethnography, prosaics, and literary form to consider how the Georgian anticolonial vernacular extended the aesthetic and political scope of the literary imagination as a tool to render mountaineer life on Georgian–Chechen borderlands.