SUMMARY:

Harsha Ram explores the emergence of the Georgian feast, the supra, and its appropriation by modernist discourses in Georgian culture in late imperial discourses. By carefully tracing textual constructions of the supra, Ram argues that it emerged from the cross-fertilizing influences of the ethnic mix of Tbilisi and the poetic encounters of the Georgian modernists with high cultures of Britain and Russia. Ram sees the supra and the literary toast as participating in articulations of aesthetic power, popular sentiment, and political authority. The Georgian feast, which the modernists cultivated as one of the pillars of Georgian cultural identity, thus emerged from the encounters between Russian and Georgian poets and their respective contexts of military service, noble status, and imperial hierarchies. Ram envisions the multiple and complex origins of the Georgian feast as evidence to overcome the model of compensatory nationalism on the one hand, and Partha Chatterjee’s model of cultural difference as the nodal point of anticolonial difference. These multiple origins and contexts of the Georgian feast suggest an experience of celebration and resistance that cannot be reduced solely to the opposition of nation to empire, or to the derivation of nation from empire. In the absence of a bourgeois public sphere, the conspiratorial societies of the Decembrists, like the festive life of Tiflis’s taverns, served as spaces in which to imagine diverse kinds of belonging that were not primarily or exclusively national. Literary forms and the social relations they rhetorically performed or poetically disguised reveal the nonsynchronous cultural practices and social imaginaries that coexisted in the space of empire. As such, they also bore the seeds of the multiple political possibilities that ultimately lay before the diverse subjects of imperial Russia. The story of the supra reveals not only its hybrid literary origins but also the multiple cosmopolitan social ambiences in which feasting and toasting took place, from Tbilisi’s taverns to the officers’ quarters of the imperial armies under the command of the generals Ermolov or Paskevich. Only careful historical restoration of these cosmopolitan contexts can help avoid a reductively national or imperial reading of this cultural phenomenon.