Gunib, composed in 1927, belongs to Titsian Tabidze’s second creative period, after he left behind his early affection for European-inspired symbolism and before he began penning overtly socialist-realist poems on Soviet themes. Gunib is perhaps the most profound meditation in the corpus of Georgian literature on Georgia’s relationship to its North Caucasus neighbors.

Set during the aftermath of the Caucasian War, which terminated in Russia’s victory and the surrender in 1859 of Imam Shamil, the leader of the pan-Caucasian resistance to the Russian conquest, the poem is also a lyrical self-interrogation in which the poet seeks to redeem what he calls the “treachery” of his people by means of the cathartic truth of poetry.

In Gunib the poet imagines himself as a warrior on the North Caucasian side. His lyric persona returns to Gunib, a village high in the mountains of Dagestan, a republic of the present-day Russian Federation that borders on Georgia. In Gunib in 1859, Imam Shamil surrendered to the Russians. The poet meditates in his poem over the Georgian complicity in Imam Shamil’s defeat, for many of the leading officers in the czarist Russian army of the time were of ethnic Georgian origin. Titsian (as the poet is generally referred to in Georgia) ponders the irony that his fellow countrymen “sold themselves into slavery” when, under the illusion that they were achieving a military victory for themselves, they collaborated with an enemy power.

Gunib is not merely a political poem, nor was Titsian Tabidze a political poet. Part of its magic is the muted nature of its indictment, mediated by a layer of complex historical allusions. While the poem’s allusive nature can be accounted for in part by the demands of Soviet censorship, such an explanation tells only half the story and obscures the nature of Titsian’s genius, which is most comfortable making bold statements through indirect, erudite suggestion.

Nor is Gunib merely one poet’s indictment of his nation; most fundamentally it is a poet’s dialogue with himself that reveals the poet at the height of his lyric genius. The speaker of the poem is simultaneously a traitor and a hero; he applies to himself both the terms murid, which evokes the tradition of Islamic freedom fighters of the North Caucasus, and giaour, the Islamic term for infidel.

The last lines are devoted to a celebration of the incantatory power of poetry and the poet’s unique ability to redeem through language the treachery of a faithless world: “I never donned the fighter’s armor,” Titsian writes, “But this battle”—by which he means the art of poetry itself—“moves even me to ecstasy. / I don’t want to be a poet drunk on blood. / Let this day be my penitence. / Let my poems wash away your treachery.”

Notably, unlike the majority of Titsian’s poetry, Gunib, one of his most significant works, was never translated into Russian. The poem appears in English in the literary journal Two Lines: Journal of Translation (San Francisco, 2006).

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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