81 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus MountaineersCloser to the region than European thinkers such as Herder was
again the example and experience of Georgia. Members of the new
generation of the 1860s criticized their predecessors for their lack of at-
tention to explicitly Georgian forms of cultural expression in the
Georgian tongue, a language, in their view, certainly sufficient to ex-
press the nuances of Molière.^155 The Romantic impulse coincided with
modern notions of the civil order and of the importance of higher lev-
els of popular literacy and educational attainment, all of which was
“useful” (sasargeblo) to the tasks of cultural renewal and awakening.^156
Like Russians, Georgians were struggling to extend “literacy to the
lower segments of the population,” as Georgians pointed out to
(Russian) school inspector V.V. Levashev in 1865. “The desire of the
natives to know their own language is completely natural and logical”
and should be supported by the state, they explained.^157 If Georgian
students faced a “Chinese alphabet” in the classroom, complained
B.Petriashvili, reading comprehension and educational progress
would be severely inhibited.^158 If the native tongue was important for
the communication of the Gospel, as we saw in the last chapter, it was
also central to the concerns of Georgian educators interested in ethics,
“morality,” and the “soul” of the student.^159 Contributors to Droeba
frequently complained about the insufficient number of Georgian in-
structors in the gymnasiums.^160 The Society for the Spread of Georgian
Literacy was founded in 1879, although the Ministry of Education in
the Transcaucasus remained reluctant to challenge the supremacy of
Russian in its schools before 1914.^161
In the North Caucasus, Uslar and other linguists hoped to equip
each narodnost’ with its own written language. Uslar was not the
first linguist to attempt this task, but he was the most successful. Ear-
lier scholars such as Andrei Shegren of the Academy of Sciences in
StPetersburg had been reluctant to modify the Russian alphabet.
Shegren simply rendered in Russian transcription what he under-
stood to be the equivalent sound supplied by his local informants,
with occasional directives, such as “pronounce gutturally.”^162
Vorontsov hoped to initiate further study, and he requested input
from a number of Academy of Sciences scholars. The ethnographic
implications of their program of linguistic study were clear from the
start, as the project was intended “to explain the dark and confusing
ethnographic interrelationships among the Caucasus peoples.”^163
Time was of the essence, as languages, like peoples and their cultures,
could disappear.^164 Adol’f Berzhe began work on the project in 1856,
but he failed to expand significantly on Shegren’s method and
dropped the matter in 186 0.^165 Uslar, by contrast, devised a new
“Caucasus alphabet” based on Cyrillic, with several additions to