60 Orientalism and Empireparticipation that scholars usually associate with the rise of national-
ism in Europe. Ivan Kireevskii was enthusiastic about what he
thought of as Pushkin’s gradual move toward narodnost’, away from
“Italian-French” to “Byronic” to “Russian-Pushkinian,” and he saw
Gogol’s work as a “complete turn around in our literature in this re-
gard.”^5 Like samobytnost’ (“originality”), which Belinskii defined in
183 4 as “the way of thinking and viewing things, in religion, lan-
guage and above all in customs,” narodnost’ was something native
and indigenous, “something inexpressible, comprehensible only to
the Russian heart,” as Kireevskii put it.^6 The question of “identity” as
Russians imagined it in the nineteenth century was very different
from the developing “principle of nationality” in Europe.
The expansion of the imperial system also meant the expansion of
similar concerns, ideas, and attitudes. Educated society (obshchestvo/
sazogadoeba) was a multi-ethnic educated world shaped and informed
by a common imperial discourse. Georgian intellectuals such as
Akaki Tsereteli, Sergo Meskhi, Ilia Chavchavadze, and many others
absorbed these ideas in St Petersburg itself and returned to Tbilisi to
establish new newspapers, discussion groups, and scholarly societ-
ies.^7 Fifty-five Georgians studied in St Petersburg alone from 1857 to
186 1, points out Oliver Reisner.^8 For Chavchavadze, in a manner fa-
miliar to students of Russian intellectual history, the “truly national”
was something that reflected the “genuine face of the people.”^9 Like
Belinskii in search of an emerging Russian literature, he profiled
works of writers such as Nikoloz Baratashvili, “our Byron,” who in
his writing “depicts genuinely Georgian portraits.”^10 Russia’s
Romantic discourse was particularly inspiring to small peoples dis-
tant from the world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. As in
Russia, however, this emerging nativistic movement was compatible
with empire. “Nationalism” in an imperial context did not mean a so-
cial movement in search of the independent nation-state, but instead
a cultural nativism fostered and cultivated, even promoted, under the
umbrella of empire.
This relationship between nativism and empire in Georgia was on
display on 22 October 1895, when Russians, Georgians, and many
others gathered to commemorate the life and work of Rapiel Eristavi.
His prose offered a “truly Georgian speech, enriched and made pleas-
ant to the ear by the beautiful language of the people.”^11 The criterion
for excellence in the arts was the ability to depict “everyday peasant
life.” Telling the story of the nation meant the writing of ethnography,
a vision of the peasant “in peasant fields and prairies, plains and
mountains, in work and play, in good times and bad, alone and
among family and hearth.”^12 The celebration commenced at the