Zaal Andronikashvili: Europe from Its Margins: Georgia and the Making of Modern Europe

Lecture at the CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at Stanford University

Europe is commonly narrated from its historical centers. Political ideas, cultural innovation, and modernity itself are assumed to originate in places such as Paris, London, or Berlin before spreading to the continent’s margins. Georgia usually appears in this narrative, if at all, as a distant periphery whose history merely reflects developments elsewhere.

This lecture argues that such a view is historically misleading. Rather than treating Georgia as Europe’s edge, it proposes to read it as one of the places from which Europe’s history becomes newly intelligible. Revisiting the invention of “Eastern Europe,” Georgia‘s democratic experiments of the early twentieth century, the multilingual urban culture and avant-garde of Tbilisi, and the shared but uneven legacy of 1989, the lecture examines how supposedly peripheral experiences challenge established narratives of European modernity.

The aim is neither to “include” Georgia in an already existing European story nor simply to correct a geographical blind spot. Rather, the lecture argues that Europe’s history itself changes once it is reconstructed from places long regarded as peripheral. Georgia thus emerges not as an exception but as a vantage point from which the cultural and political history of modern Europe can be reconsidered.

Literary scholar Zaal Andronikashvili is a research associate with the project Small/Minor Literature as World Literature. Literature as a Medium of Emancipation.