Zaal Andronikashvili: Provincializing National Literatures: Soviet Literary Universalism and Georgian Alternatives

Venue: University of California, Berkeley, Dwinelle Hall, South Dr, Berkeley, CA 94720

Research project(s): Small/Minor Literature as World Literature

Lecture at the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at University of California, Berkeley

How can a literary system celebrate cultural diversity while quietly organizing it into a hierarchy?

This talk explores that contradiction through the Soviet project of “multinational literature.” At its center is the six-volume History of Multinational Soviet Literature (1970–1974), which presented the literatures of the USSR as equal parts of a common whole while positioning Russian literature as the privileged route to universality.

Georgia reveals both the power and the limits of this model. Through Georgii Lomidze, Akaki Bakradze, and Guram Dochanashvili, the talk traces three competing visions of literary belonging: imperial integration, national self-assertion, and a transnational republic of readers.

At stake is a larger question: Who gets to define the universal—and what happens to literatures forced to reach it through an imperial center?

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