Sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies and the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia.
Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, developed a multilingual and polyphonic culture between 1795 and 1921, which I would like to call Cosmopolis in vague reference to Sheldon Pollock: a translocal basic order that exerts a cultural attraction and can be read and interpreted like a work of art or rather a multilingual palimpsest. The polyphonic literature of Tbilisi united several national languages: Georgian, Armenian and Azeri, was later an important place of the (also polyphonic) Russian and Georgian avant-garde, went beyond the boundaries of literature and established a cosmopolitan urban culture and art of life.
Zaal Andronikashvili is a research fellow at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin and a Professor at the Ilia-State-University, Tbilisi. He studied History and Philology in Tbilisi and Saarbrücken and completed his PhD at the Göttingen-University (2005). Narratology (theory of sužet), metahistory of literature, small/minor literature(s) – world literature, cultural semantics, political theology, cultural history of Georgia, Caucasus and Black-Sea-Region, soviet and post-soviet cultural history. He is an autor of three monographs: Die Erzeugung des dramatischen Textes. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Sujets. Erisch Schmied Verlag. Berlin 2008; Landna(h)me Georgien. Studien zur kulturellen Semantik, Kadmos Kulturverlag. Berlin 2018 (with Emzar Jgerenaia and Franziska Thun-Hohenstein) and Uʒlurebis dideba. Ṗolitiḳuri teologia sakartveloši [Glory of Feebleness. Political Theology in Georgia]. Tbilisi. Ilia State University Press. (in Print). Currently he is working on the new book project “Literature in Georgia. Between Small Literature and World Literature.”