Ukrainian Literature in the Academic Space of Tbilisi State University: The History of Teaching and the Transformation of Paradigms

Nana GAPRINDASHVILI
Ivane MTCHEDELADZE

Abstract: This article examines the history of teaching Ukrainian literature at Tbilisi State University from the 1940s to the present. Drawing on archival doc­uments, curricula, textbooks, scholarly works, and other primary sources, it an­alyzes the principal stages in the establishment and institutional development of Ukrainian literature as a field of study. Particular attention is paid to the impact of Soviet educational and scholarly policy, under which Ukrainian literature was initially taught within the frameworks of Russian Studies and the ‘Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR.’ The article highlights the roles of Mikheil Kintsurashvili, Tengiz Buachidze, and Otar Bakanidze in the formation of the academic tradition of Georgian Ukrainian Studies and in the training of profes­sional Ukrainianists.

The study reveals the contradictory nature of this process. On the one hand, within a policy aimed at bringing peoples closer together and creating a unified cultural and political space defined by communist ideology, the Soviet system established institutional foundations for the teaching and study of Ukrainian lit­erature; on the other hand, it confined its study and interpretation within a So­viet ideological paradigm in which national literatures were conceived as con­stituent parts of a unified multinational Soviet literature. The article analyzes the transformation of this legacy in the post-Soviet period, the de-ideologization of teaching, the institutional strengthening of Ukrainian Studies, and the expansion of the range of authors and problems studied. It demonstrates that, at the present stage, the teaching of Ukrainian literature at TSU combines the preservation of a historically established academic tradition with its critical reassessment through contemporary comparative, cultural-studies, and postcolonial approaches.

Keywords: Teaching Ukrainian Literature; Tbilisi State University; Georgian Ukrainian Studies; Academic Tradition; Soviet Educational Policy; Postcolonial Transformation.

Introduction

Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University is a major academic center for the teaching and study of Ukrainian literature in Georgia. Since the 1940s, an academic tradition of teaching and researching Ukrainian literature has gradually taken shape and developed there. The history of this process is complex and multifac­eted and is closely connected with the political, ideological, and educational changes that occurred in the Geor­gian academic sphere at different historical stages.

The study is based on archival and other primary sources documenting the academic tradition and institu­tional history of Georgian Ukrainian Studies. Materials and documents preserved in the Central Archive of Contemporary History of the Na­tional Archives of Georgia, the Man­uscripts Department of the Giorgi Leonidze State Museum of Georgian Literature, and the archives of the former Department of National Liter­atures, Literary Relations and Trans­lation and the Center for Ukrainian Studies at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University have been analyzed. The source base is supplemented by publications preserved in the private libraries of prominent Georgian scholars, some of which have now become bibliographic rarities. These materials are examined in light of contemporary approaches in Soviet studies, Slavic studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies, making it possible to identify the principal stages in the development of the teaching of Ukrainian literature and their transformation within the Geor­gian academic sphere. The study considers the specific features of the teaching process: the factors that shaped the emergence of Ukrainian literature as a subject of instruction; the disciplines within which it devel­oped; the authors, themes, and prob­lems represented in curricula and those left outside them; in other words, the ways in which Soviet ide­ology determined the selection and interpretation of material. Particular attention is devoted to the profes­sional training of instructors who taught Ukrainian literature at differ­ent periods and to their connections with Ukrainian academic and cultural circles. From this perspective, the article examines which disciplinary specialists initially combined their primary fields with the teaching of Ukrainian literature and how a pro­fessional community of Ukrainianists emerged in Georgia. It also seeks to establish how the academic legacy formed during the Soviet period was transformed after the collapse of the USSR: what was retained, what was revised, and what new content en­tered the teaching and study of Ukrainian literature.

The Soviet Period: The Formation of a Tradition and the Origins of Teaching Ukrainian Literature

The formation of a tradition of teaching Ukrainian literature in Georgia was closely connected with Soviet educational, scholarly, and cultural policy, which was inherently contradictory: on the one hand, it created institutional opportunities for the study of national cultures and literatures; on the other, it placed their development and interpretation within Soviet ideological frame­works. To understand this contradic­tion, the specific character of the So­viet Union as an imperial system must be taken into account. The prominent Slavic scholar Terry Martin described this feature of So­viet nationality policy through the concept of the ‘Affirmative Action Empire,’ referring to state support, within an imperial political system, for the development of the national languages, cultures, education, and corresponding institutions of non-Russian peoples. Contemporary Slavic studies also regard the creation of research centers and academic structures as one of the institutional outcomes of the ‘Affirmative Action Empire¹.

It is within this contradictory his­torical context that the development of Georgian Ukrainian Studies and the formation of the tradition of teaching Ukrainian literature in Georgia’s educational sphere – a tra­dition now more than eight decades old – should be considered.

The history of Georgian Ukrain­ian Studies originates in Georgian Slavic Studies. In Soviet Georgia, Slavic Studies as a scholarly and ed­ucational field primarily encom­passed the study and teaching of Russian language and literature, Rus­sian history, and Russian-Georgian and Georgian-Russian historical and literary relations. Its institutional foundations were laid at Tbilisi State University: Russian-language in­struction began in 1924-1925, and in 1930 the Department of the History of Russian Language and Literature was established; in 1938 it was di­vided into two independent depart­ments, Russian Language and the History of Russian Literature. This institutional strengthening of Russian Studies was directly connected with Soviet cultural policy and the process of creating a common cultural space. As Irine Modebadze and Tatiana Megrelishvili observe: «После сове­ти­зации активно начинается про­цесс создания общего культурного поля. Государственная машина способствует обретению русисти­кой приоритетного статуса»².

Professor Otar Bakanidze, the founder of the Georgian school of Ukrainian Studies, briefly notes in his work on the history of Ukrainian Studies at Tbilisi State University that Ukrainian literature began to be taught at the university as early as the 1940s and that the first instructor and specialist was Mikheil Kintsurashvili. Despite the particular importance of this information, Bakanidze does not discuss the issue in detail. Recon­structing the initial stage in the his­tory of teaching Ukrainian literature therefore requires that this evidence be clarified and supplemented through archival materials³.

To reconstruct this early stage, the present study examined archival ma­terials documenting the activities of the Department of the History of Russian Literature in the 1940s and 1950s, preserved in the Central Ar­chive of Contemporary History of the National Archives of Georgia (Fond No. 473). The materials include minutes of departmental meetings, work plans, and reports, whose evi­dence makes it possible to clarify Mikheil Kintsurashvili’s role and the circumstances in which the teaching of Ukrainian literature began at Tbilisi State University. He studied at the Faculty of Philology of Kharkiv University. Soviet-period scholarship presents Kharkiv University at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century as one of the important connecting centers be­tween Georgia and Ukraine⁴. M. Kintsurashvili was for many years a member of TSU’s Department of the History of Russian Literature, within which the foundations for teaching Ukrainian literature were laid.

The archival materials docu­menting the work of the Department of the History of Russian Literature allow us to identify the principal teaching and research areas within which the study of Ukrainian litera­ture later developed⁵. The depart­ment’s teaching included chronologi­cally organized courses on eight­eenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Russian literature, as well as Russian folklore and other subjects. According to the 1943-1944 work plan, alongside research on literary history, one of the department’s ma­jor scholarly areas was the study of Russian-Georgian literary relations⁶. Among the diverse forms of literary relations, particular attention was paid to literary translation. Thus, three interconnected areas gradually emerged in the department’s work – literary history, literary relations, and literary translation – which subse­quently became important founda­tions for the teaching and study of Ukrainian literature.

Accordingly, the established model for researching and teaching Russian-Georgian literary relations was subsequently extended to rela­tions with the literatures of other So­viet republics, including Ukraine. The establishment of Ukrainian liter­ature within the Georgian Soviet aca­demic sphere is a clear example of this process. Within the Department of Russian Literature, considerable attention came to be devoted to the study and teaching of the literatures of the peoples of the USSR and of literary relations. National literatures were studied within a Soviet cultural and ideological system that, espe­cially from the 1930s onward, in­creasingly prescribed permissible themes and interpretive frameworks. In Richard Pipes’s assessment, whereas in the 1920s Soviet censor­ship primarily determined what could not be published, from the 1930s it also dictated to authors what they ‘had to write,’ thereby sharply inten­sifying ideological uniformity in So­viet culture⁷.

Materials preserved in the Na­tional Archives indicate that Mikheil Kintsurashvili, an associate professor in the Department of the History of Russian Literature, probably began teaching the course ‘History of the Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR’ at TSU’s Faculty of Philol­ogy in 1944; Ukrainian literary his­tory, together with Belarusian litera­ture, formed one component of the course. At this stage, no archival or other documentary material has been found that would allow the precise content of the course – the range of authors, texts, and topics studied – to be established. Nor did a Georgian-language textbook on the history of Ukrainian literature exist at the time. Under these circumstances, some basis for reconstructing the likely content of the course is provided both by Kintsurashvili’s own scholarly and translation activity and by the recollection of his former student, later one of the leading representa­tives of Georgian Ukrainian Studies, Professor Otar Bakanidze. In one interview, Bakanidze states: ‘In the 1940s, the teaching of Ukrainian lit­erature at TSU was entrusted specifi­cally to Iasamani [Iasamani was M. Kintsurashvili’s pseudonym]. He translated excellently from Ukrainian and brought his translations to his students⁸.’ This recollection confirms that Kintsurashvili used his own translations in teaching. Given his scholarly interests, it may also be assumed that in shaping the course he drew on his own research on Ukrai­nian literature.

Mikheil Kintsurashvili’s personal archive, preserved in the Manuscripts Department of the Giorgi Leonidze State Museum of Georgian Litera­ture, contains an unpublished manu­script entitled ‘From the History of the Literary Friendship of Ukraine and Georgia’. An authorial note states that the paper was presented on 12 March 1954 at an open meeting of the Faculty of Philology of Tbilisi State University⁹. The manuscript provides further evidence that re­search on Ukrainian literature at TSU was also developing within the para­digm of literary-relations studies, which occupied an important place in Soviet literary scholarship.

After Mikheil Kintsurashvili’s death, a new stage in the history of teaching Ukrainian literature began, associated with Tengiz Buachidze and Otar Bakanidze. Minutes No. 14 of the meeting of the Department of the History of Russian Literature on 4 February 1955 record that, following Kintsurashvili’s death, his teaching hours for the ‘History of the Litera­tures of the Peoples of the USSR’ had to be reassigned to another member of the department. The de­partment resolved to entrust the course to senior lecturer Tengiz Buachidze: «В связи с тем, что доцент кафедры М. П. Кинцурашвили скончился, его часы по истории литературы народов СССР следует передать какому-нибудь члену кафедры. Постановили: передать часы по истории литературы народов СССР старшему преподавателю Т. П. Буачидзе»¹⁰.

Otar Bakanidze also joined the department’s work that same year. In Minutes No. 28 of the departmental meeting of 23 June 1955, the head of the department, Professor Vano Shaduri, proposed the appointment of senior laboratory assistant Otar Bakanidze to the position of assis­tant: «Представлен на должность ассистента ст. лаборант О. Баканидзе». The same document, in distributing the Department of the History of Russian Literature’s teaching load, indicates that Bakanidze taught the course ‘History of the Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR’ in the Georgian-language section of the Faculty of Philology. This marked the beginning of his many years of teaching and scholar­ship in Ukrainian Studies, which later became decisive for the teaching of Ukrainian literature and the institu­tional development of Georgian Ukrainian Studies at Tbilisi State University¹¹.

TSU archival materials show that the organization of the department’s research work also involved assign­ing each member an annual research topic. At the meeting of the Depart­ment of the History of Russian Liter­ature on 7 February 1955, senior lecturer Tengiz Buachidze was as­signed «Курс лекций по истории украинской литературы» as his an­nual topic¹². This fact is significant for the history of teaching Ukrainian literature because it points to an at­tempt to give the course a more sys­tematic and programmatically orga­nized form.

The systematization of the Ukrainian literature course at TSU in the mid-1950s should also be viewed in the context of broader Soviet aca­demic developments. As D. Tsyganov observes, the construction of an academic narrative of ‘multina­tional Soviet literature’ began as early as the late 1940s and was linked to the production of academic histo­ries of individual national litera­tures¹³. One important manifestation of this process was the systematiza­tion of the history of Ukrainian liter­ature.

In this respect, 1954 is particu­larly noteworthy. The 300th anniver­sary of the Pereiaslav Rada was widely commemorated throughout the Soviet Union and was officially interpreted in Soviet discourse as the ‘300th anniversary of Ukraine’s reu­nification with Russia’. Literature and scholarship occupied an im­portant place in the jubilee campaign. As Serhy Yekelchyk demonstrates, the Soviet cultural policy of this pe­riod also influenced the principles governing the selection of Ukrainian national heritage and its canonical representation¹⁴.

In that same year, 1954, the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR published the first volume of «История украинской литературы» – «Дооктябрьская литература». Prepared by a distin­guished collective of scholars, the volume presented Ukrainian literary history according to a chronological-historical principle, while its periodi­zation followed the Marxist scheme of Soviet literary historiography: the literary process was conceptualized from the era of feudalism, through the development of capitalist rela­tions and imperialism, to the era of proletarian revolution. National liter­ary history was thus structured ac­cording to the succession of socio-economic formations¹⁵.

This publication occupied an im­portant place in the teaching of Ukrainian literature at TSU and be­came a major resource for instruc­tional practice. The Ukrainian section of «Программа по истории украи­нской и белорусской литературы», compiled and pub­lished by Tengiz Buachidze in 1956, was based on the 1954 academic «История украинс­кой литературы». Consequently, the programmatic systematization of the Ukrainian literature course at TSU was connected with the same aca­demic and methodological model within which the scholarly canon of Ukrainian literary history was being formed in Soviet Ukraine at the time.

This fact acquires additional sig­nificance because the methodological curriculum «Программа курса „Литературы народов СССР”» in­tended for state universities was pub­lished in Moscow only in 1962, whereas a specialized curriculum in the history of Ukrainian and Bela­rusian literatures, authored by Tengiz Buachidze, already existed at TSU in 1956¹⁶. The available evidence there­fore shows that by the mid-1950s the teaching of Ukrainian literature at TSU was already acquiring a system­atic and programmatically organized character. The course was taught in both the Georgian – and Russian-lan­guage sections of the Faculty of Phi­lology: Tengiz Buachidze taught the Russian-language course, while Otar Bakanidze taught the Georgian-lan­guage one.

Archival materials enable us to reconstruct chronologically the grad­ual development of Ukrainian-litera­ture teaching and to observe its rela­tionship with the department’s schol­arly work. The documents show that annual research topics assigned to younger instructors were often di­rectly connected with their courses and served the substantive prepara­tion of those courses. Materials from the second half of the 1950s reveal more clearly the formation of the ‘History of the Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR’ as an academic discipline, within which Ukrainian literature occupied a significant place. For example, Minutes No. 11 of the departmental meeting of 15 December 1958 state: «О. А. Баканидзе говорил об основных положениях своей годовой темы – Лекции по истории литературы народов СССР (Часть I). Работа представлена на грузинском языке, в ней говорится об украинской и белорусской литературе древнего периода»¹⁷. This entry shows that by the end of the 1950s Bakanidze was already working systematically on a lecture course in the ‘History of the Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR,’ whose section on the early period included Ukrainian and Bela­rusian literatures.

To understand the history of teaching Ukrainian literature, it is also important to consider the profes­sional profiles and cultural-academic experience of the specialists who taught the course at different stages. In the 1950s and 1960s, Otar Bakanidze and Tengiz Buachidze both researched and taught Ukrainian literature, but a comparative analysis of their work reveals different re­search orienta­tions. Ukrainian litera­ture itself, Georgian-Ukrainian liter­ary relations, and connections with Ukrainian scholarly and cultural cir­cles came to occupy an increasingly important place in Bakanidze’s re­search inte­rests and gradually be­came the prin­ci­pal focus of his long professional career. For Buachidze, by contrast, the study and teaching of Ukrainian literature remained one strand of a broader professional ac­tivity, while his principal scholarly specialization was Russian literature.

Archival materials from the 1960s show that the young scholar Otar Bakanidze intensively and purpose­fully established ties with Ukrainian academic circles and research insti­tutions, collaborated with Ukrainian writers and scholars, worked with archival materials, and actively used contemporary Ukrainian scholarly and critical literature in his research. In this respect, his professional tra­jectory differed from that of Geor­gian Slavists and Russianists for whom Ukrainian literature did not constitute an independent and sys­tematic field of research and was ad­dressed mainly within the broader frameworks of Slavic Studies, Rus­sian Studies, or Soviet multinational literature. In Bakanidze’s case, by contrast, the prospect emerged of es­tablishing Ukrainian literature and Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations as an independent professional field.

As a result of many years of work in Ukrainian archives and research institutions, Otar Bakanidze identi­fied and studied important primary sources that became the basis of his fundamental works on nineteenth – and twentieth-century Ukrainian lit­erature and Georgian-Ukrainian liter­ary relations. His research increas­ingly displayed a tendency to study Ukrainian literature as a distinctive national literary tradition. Under the Soviet ideological system, in which national literatures were conceived as constituent parts of a unified multi­national Soviet literature, such a re­search orientation acquired particular significance: demonstrating the his­torical and artistic distinctiveness of Ukrainian literature also implied ar­ticulating the specificity of Ukrainian cultural identity. In this respect, Bakanidze’s long-term scholarly and pedagogical activity became an im­portant stage in the formation of Georgian literary Ukrainian Studies as a professional field.

The Institutionalization of Georgian Ukrainian Studies: 1960-1991

During the so-called ‘Thaw,’ the intensification of cultural and schol­arly ties between Georgia and Ukraine created new opportunities for teaching and researching Ukrain­ian literature. It was in this period that Georgian Ukrainian Studies gradually acquired the features of an independent academic field and the foundations were laid for its subse­quent institutionalization.

From the second half of the 1960s, Ukrainian literature and Georgian-Ukrainian cultural relations occupied an increasingly important place in Otar Bakanidze’s research. In 1967-1968 he published the mon­ographs Ukrainian Theatre in Tbilisi (1967) and From the History of Georgian-Ukrainian Literary Rela­tions (1968). These and other works examined both the links of Georgian writers – Ilya Chavchavadze and Akaki Tsereteli – with the Ukrainian cultural sphere and the relationship of Ukrainian cultural figures with Geor­gia and Georgian culture, including the history of Oleksandr Navrotsky’s translation of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin and Mykola Hulak’s Rustaveli studies. A bilateral model for the study of Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations thus gradually took shape: on the one hand, the relation­ship of Ukrainian writers and cultural figures to Georgia and Georgian culture; on the other, the connections of Georgian authors with Ukrainian literature and culture. This approach continued the principles of literary-relations research developed in Pro­fessor Vano Shaduri’s scholarly school, but in Bakanidze’s work it gradually became the basis for sys­tematic research focused specifically on Ukrainian material.

Particularly noteworthy in this re­spect is the monograph Ukrainian Theatre in Tbilisi, which examines the history of Ukrainian drama and theatre in Georgia through the lenses of reception and cultural contact. In Bakanidze’s work of this period, Ukrainian literature and culture in­creasingly emerge as an independent field of inquiry rather than merely as part of the broader concerns of Rus­sian Studies or the ‘Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR.’ This tendency laid an important foundation for the subsequent professional and institu­tional development of Georgian Ukrainian Studies.

Cooperation between Tbilisi and Kyiv State Universities also intensi­fied during this period. Student-ex­change programs enabled Georgian students to receive training directly within the Ukrainian academic envi­ronment. As a result of this coopera­tion, a new generation of professional Ukrainianists gradually emerged in Georgia, creating an important basis for the field’s further development and institutional strengthening.

Student exchange between Tbilisi State University and Kyiv State Uni­versity in the 1960s and 1970s was an important form of academic coop­eration and contributed substantially to the training of a new generation of Ukrainianists in Georgia. Georgian specialists educated in Kyiv subse­quently pursued professional work in different areas. One group – Revaz Khvedelidze and Nuri Verdzadze – engaged in research and teaching and studied Georgian-Ukrainian literary and cultural relations, while literary translation occupied an important place in the work of Jaba Asatiani and Amiran Asanidze. Thus, within Georgian Ukrainian Studies, schol­arly and pedagogical work developed in parallel with translation practice, the two strands complementing one another.

Revaz Khvedelidze’s research on Georgian and Ukrainian modernism, his studies of Rustaveli’s reception in Ukrainian literature, and his work on the history and theory of Georgian-Ukrainian translation relations en­riched the scholarly and teaching base of Georgian Ukrainian Studies with new material. Literary transla­tions made directly from Ukrainian were another important part of this process: Jaba Asatiani translated Ukrainian prose into Georgian, while Amiran Asanidze worked for decades on a Georgian translation of Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneida. This activity introduced Georgian readers to new texts of Ukrainian literature and sim­ultaneously diversified the Georgian-language material available for teaching.

Thus, the scholarly, pedagogical, and translation activities of the new generation of Ukrainianists signifi­cantly expanded the possibilities for studying and teaching Ukrainian lit­erature in Georgia and helped con­solidate the professional and aca­demic foundations of Georgian Ukrainian Studies.

An important event in the institu­tional development of Georgian Ukrainian Studies was the establish­ment of the ‘Ukraine’ Club at TSU in 1969. Otar Bakanidze conceived the idea during the Decade of Georgian Culture in Ukraine, and it was real­ized with the support of Ukrainian colleagues, writers, and intellectuals. The club aimed to popularize Ukrainian literature and culture in Georgia and to deepen Georgian-Ukrainian cultural ties. Literary translation and the publication of bi­lingual Georgian-Ukrainian collec­tions of Ukrainian poetry became one of its major activities; alongside the work of experienced translators, these volumes also published poetic translations by students of the Fac­ulty of Philology. After the Depart­ment of the Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR, Literary Relations and Literary Translation was established in 1975, this work acquired a more systematic character, with students of the department actively participating in preparing the collections and translating Ukrainian poetry. Over the years, a number of notable bilin­gual collections of Ukrainian poetry in translation were published: Lesia Ukrainka, Light! Light! (Tbilisi: TSU Press, 1971); Hryhorii Skovoroda, A Benevolent Trace (Tbilisi: TSU Press, 1972); Ivan Franko, The Stonecutters (Tbilisi: TSU Press, 1981); God’s Mercy: Poetry by Davit Guramishvili and Lesia Ukrainka (Tbilisi: TSU Press, 1996); Taras Shevchenko, Kobzar (Tbilisi: TSU Press, 2014); The Heavenly Lan­guage: Young Ukrainian Poets in Georgian (Tbilisi: TSU Press, 2016); and others.

Alongside their cultural signifi­cance, these publications also per­formed an important pedagogical function: they contributed to the pro­fessional training of young transla­tors, created opportunities for com­parative analysis of original and translated texts, and provided addi­tional Georgian-language resources for courses on Ukrainian literature. The activities of the ‘Ukraine’ Club thus brought together the populariza­tion of Ukrainian literature, the prac­tice of literary translation, and the university’s teaching and research work.

The scholarly and teaching profile of the Department of the Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR, Literary Relations and Literary Translation (headed by Professor Otar Bakanidze) combined the history of the literatures of the peoples of the USSR, literary relations, and the problems of literary translation. Ukrainian literature and the study of Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations occupied an important place in the department’s work, while the history and theory of literary translation were added to its teaching agenda.

From its establishment, specialists educated in Ukraine also became in­volved in the department’s work. Among them was Revaz Khvedelidze, for whom the history and theory of literary translation be­came one of the principal areas of scholarly and pedagogical interest, reflected in his academic theses: the Candidate dissertation Rustaveli in Ukrainian Literature (1972) and the doctoral dissertation The Modernist Novella in Georgian and Ukrainian Literature (2005). Thus, the study of translation relations was gradually added to the teaching of Ukrainian literature and research on Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations. Materials documen­ting the department’s teaching show that Georgian-Ukrainian literary and translation re­lations were also reflected in student research, with term papers and quali­fication theses prepared in this area¹⁸.

During the 1970s and 1980s, re­search on Ukrainian literature and Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations expanded further. Otar Bakanidze published the monographs Lesia Ukrainka (1971), Hryhorii Skovoroda (1972), Mykola Bazhan (1974), Maksym Rylsky (1975), and Georgian-Ukrainian Literary and Theatrical Relations (1982). Given the scarcity of Georgian-language textbooks, these works served a ped­agogical function in addition to their scholarly purpose. An interesting primary source for reconstructing the content of Bakanidze’s courses is the textbook «Українська радянська література» (Kyiv, 1979), edited by P. Kononenko and V. Fashchenko and preserved in the library of the Center for Ukrainian Studies. Bakanidze’s copy bears a commemo­rative inscrip­tion by V. Fashchenko dated 1980, while the text contains Bakanidze’s annotations on Volodymyr Sosiura, Pavlo Tychyna, Oles Honchar, Ukrainian drama, and the Soviet-period literary process. This material suggests that Ukrain­ian-language scho­larly and instruc­tional publica­tions were among the sources used by Bakanidze in pre­paring his Georgian-language lecture courses¹⁹.

An important stage in the system­atization of teaching Ukrainian liter­ature was Bakanidze’s Essays on the History of Ukrainian Literature (1985), which discussed major repre­sentatives of eighteenth – and nine­teenth-century Ukrainian literature – Hryhorii Skovoroda, Ivan Kotliarevsky, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Taras Shevchenko, Marko Vovchok, and others – as well as classics of Ukrainian drama. Un­like the author’s earlier monographic studies, Essays represented an at­tempt to create systematic Georgian-language teaching material on the history of Ukrainian literature. Alt­hough its methodological and inter­pretive frameworks reflect the schol­arly and ideological context of the period in which it was written, the scarcity of alternative Georgian-lan­guage teaching literature means that it retains pedagogical significance to this day. A number of themes estab­lished during this period – classics of Ukrainian literature, Georgian-Ukrainian literary and translation re­lations, Ukrainian theatre in Georgia, and Lesia Ukrainka and Georgia – were retained in post-Soviet curric­ula, although their methodological frameworks of interpretation gradu­ally changed.

Post-Soviet Transformation

The dissolution of the Soviet Un­ion and the restoration of Georgia’s independence fundamentally changed the country’s academic and educa­tional environment. The collapse of Soviet ideological frameworks placed the de-ideologization of research and teaching, the reassessment of estab­lished concepts and interpretive models, and integration into the Western academic sphere on the agenda. These changes also affected the teaching of the literatures of the former Soviet republics: after the dis­solution of the Soviet model of the ‘Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR,’ it became possible to con­ceptualize them as independent na­tional literatures. The basis of Geor­gian-Ukrainian academic and cultural relations also changed – the Soviet ideological discourse of the ‘friend­ship of peoples’ was replaced by cultural and scholarly cooperation between two independent states. At the same time, post-Soviet transfor­mation did not mean a complete re­jection of the academic tradition es­tablished earlier: research on Geor­gian-Ukrainian historical and cultural relations continued, while its con­ceptual and methodological frame­works gradually changed.

In the post-Soviet period, both the name of the department and the con­cept underlying its work changed: the ‘Department of the History of the Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR, Literary Relations and Liter­ary Translation’ was renamed the ‘Department of National Literatures, Literary Relations and Translation.’ This change in name also reflected a conceptual shift – from the Soviet model of ‘multinational literature’ toward an emphasis on independent national literatures. It was within this department that the teaching of Ukrainian literature and Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations continued at TSU’s Faculty of Philology. In the post-Soviet period, the department offered the BA program Literary Relations and Translation and the MA program Translation Studies; instruction was provided in Geor­gian- and Russian-language sections.

In the post-Soviet period, the teaching of Ukrainian literature be­came increasingly connected with issues of intercultural communica­tion, dialogue between cultures, and literary translation. At the same time, analysis of curricula preserved in the department’s archive and library shows that the change in ideological framework was not followed by a radical renewal of course content: a significant part of the subject matter and teaching literature continued the academic tradition established in the Soviet period, though now without its Soviet ideological context. One ex­ample is the MA course syllabus Lit­erary Relations (Ukrainian-Georgian: From Ancient Times to the Present), compiled by Professor Otar Bakanidze in 1999. A substantial part of the themes and issues in the sylla­bus drew on topics developed in ear­lier works by Bakanidze and Tengiz Buachidze. Thus, at the initial post-Soviet stage, change affected the ide­ological and interpretive framework of this legacy more than the substan­tive renewal of the curriculum itself.

The Russian-language section of­fered the course History of East Slavic Literatures, whose structure retained the principle developed in the 1960s–1980s of grouping indi­vidual national literatures within a broader regional bloc. The syllabus compiled in 1997 by Professor Otar Bakanidze and Associate Professor Konstantine Kvachantiradze contin­ued the earlier teaching model in this respect, although its content had al­ready expanded. Alongside tradition­ally studied authors, the syllabus in­cluded representatives of the Ukrai­nian Sixtiers – Dmytro Pavlychko, Lina Kostenko, Borys Oliinyk, Ivan Drach, and Yurii Mushketyk – whose work had re­ceived comparatively less attention in Soviet-era courses. The 1997 sylla­bus therefore clearly reflects the spe­cific character of the post-Soviet transitional stage: the previously es­tablished structural model was re­tained, while the range of authors and themes gradually expanded²⁰.

From 1997, the BA level also in­cluded the synthetic course Literature of the Peoples of Eastern Europe and Transcaucasia, authored by Associate Professor Revaz Khvedelidze. Among Eastern European literatures, the course covered the histories of Ukrainian and Belarusian literature, as well as their relations with Geor­gian literature. Ukrainian literature was taught chronologically and in­cluded early and modern literature, literary processes of the late nine­teenth and early twentieth centuries, and the contemporary period; the Belarusian component was organized according to a similar principle. The curriculum thus retained the chrono­logical and regional approach estab­lished in the preceding period. So­viet-era works were still listed as the principal teaching and methodologi­cal literature, a circumstance ex­plained by the absence of new Geor­gian-language textbooks. The crea­tion of new teaching literature there­fore remained one of the important needs of post-Soviet Georgian Ukra­inian Studies.

Despite the difficulties of the post-Soviet period, an important stage in the history of teaching Ukrainian literature was the publica­tion of the second (1997) and third (2004) volumes of Otar Bakanidze’s History of Ukrainian Literature, which substantially alleviated the shortage of Georgian-language teaching litera­ture. The second vol­ume examines the life and work of Panas Myrny, Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, and Lesia Ukrainka, while the third is devoted to twenti­eth-century Ukrai­nian literature and covers Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylsky, Mykola Bazhan, Oleksandr Korniichuk, and Oles Honchar. The volumes retain a traditional histori­cal-chronological approach to literary history; discus­sion of individual au­thors is accom­panied by analysis of their connec­tions with Georgia and Georgian culture. In this respect, the three-volume work continues the earlier research and teaching tradition of Georgian Ukrainian Studies while also providing a systematic Geor­gian-language resource on the history of Ukrainian literature.

From the perspective of contem­porary Ukrainian Studies, the meth­odological and interpretive frame­works of the three-volume work re­quire substantial reassessment: they naturally reflect the approaches to literary scholarship and the principles of author selection characteristic of their period, some of which have been significantly revised in contem­porary Ukrainian and international Ukrainian Studies. Nevertheless, in the absence of a new systematic Georgian-language textbook of com­parable scope on the history of Ukrainian literature, Bakanidze’s three volumes continue to retain both pedagogical value and importance as a source for the history of Georgian Ukrainian Studies.

Georgia’s accession to the Bolo­gna Process in 2005 led to large-scale reforms in higher education aimed at bringing the Georgian educational sphere closer to European standards. These changes affected both the structure and content of curricula and created a new institutional environ­ment for the further transformation of teaching Ukrainian literature.

A new stage in the post-Soviet development of Georgian Ukrainian Studies began in 2007. The Institute of Ukrainian Studies (today the Pro­fessor Otar Bakanidze Center for Ukrainian Studies) was established at TSU’s Faculty of Humanities, and the MA program Ukrainian Studies was launched. On the one hand, the program continued the academic tra­dition established at TSU – Ukrainian literature continued to be taught both as literary history and through the prism of Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations; on the other hand, its cur­riculum broadened and its interdisci­plinary dimension was strengthened. A major feature of the program was close cooperation with Ukrainian academic institutions – Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the Institute of Ukrain­ian Studies. An interdisciplinary course, History of Ukraine and Pro­spects for Development, was added to the philological disciplines and was taught remotely from Kyiv by Academician Petro Kononenko.

The new institutional and aca­demic environment significantly broadened the thematic scope of teaching and research on Ukrainian literature. Direct cooperation with Ukrainian research centers, intern­ships undertaken there by Georgian students and researchers, and access to new scholarly literature made pos­sible the systematic study of authors, movements, and cultural processes that had been underrepresented in Soviet teaching and scholarship or excluded for ideological reasons. Curricula and research gradually gave an important place to the re­pressed authors of the ‘Executed Re­naissance,’ Ukrainian modernism and the avant-garde, émigré and dissident literature, samizdat, the underground, and postmodern writing. The range of authors and issues studied thus expanded, while the Soviet-era inter­pretive model of Ukrainian literary history was reassessed.

The expansion of the teaching and research agenda in Ukrainian litera­ture was accompanied by methodo­logical renewal. Interpreting previ­ously understudied authors and liter­ary phenomena required the adoption of new theoretical approaches: con­temporary approaches to modernism, the avant-garde, and postmodernism, as well as methodologies drawn from colonial and postcolonial studies, gradually became established in Georgian Ukrainian Studies. Cooper­ation with Ukrainian academic cen­ters and the professional training of a new generation of Georgian Ukrai-nianists played an important role in this process. Education and research internships in Ukraine ena­bled them to engage directly with contemporary Ukrainian literary scholarship, work with previously less accessible texts and archival materials, and integrate the knowledge acquired into research and teaching in Georgia.

Professional ties with the Ukrain­ian academic environment had played an important role since the early stages of Georgian Ukrainian Studies, but in the post-Soviet period they acquired particular importance for the field’s thematic and method­ological renewal. Despite socio-eco­nomic difficulties, cooperation con­tinued with leading Ukrainian aca­demic institutions – Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the Institute of Ukrain­ian Stu­dies. Two stages can be dis­tinguished in the professional training and internship experience of Geor­gian Ukrainianists within this coop­eration.

The first stage is associated with the 1990s. Nino Naskidashvili com­pleted a BA program in Ukrainian Philology at Taras Shevchenko Na­tional University of Kyiv, while Gocha Kvantaliani undertook an in­ternship at the same university’s De­partment of Comparative Literature. Their subsequent dissertation re­search examined Pavlo Tychyna and Oles Honchar in relation to Georgian literature. These studies also intro­duced into Georgian Ukrainian Studies problems that had previously recei-ved little attention. Naskidashvili examined Soviet re­pression and Ukrainian literary pro­cesses of the 1930s, while Kvantaliani focused on the Soviet ideological context of the 1960s and anti-Soviet discourse. Their work may therefore be re­garded as an early manifestation of the thematic renewal of Georgian Ukrainian Studies.

The second stage began in 2009 and is associated with systematic in­ternships in Ukraine for students of the new MA program. Direct contact with the Ukrainian academic envi­ronment contributed to a further ex­pansion of the research agenda of literary Ukrainian Studies in Georgia. Ukrainian Sixtiers and dissident liter­ature (Sophio Chkhatarashvili), post-Soviet Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian postmodernism (Ivane Mtchedeladze), as well as other is­sues that had previously been little studied or entirely unexamined in Georgian Ukrainian Studies, became subjects of research.

Importantly, the new research agenda did not remain confined to scholarly publications but was gradu­ally integrated into courses in the Ukrainian Philology module of the revised MA program in Slavic Phi­lology. These include Current Issues in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Cen­tury Ukrainian Literature, Problems in ­the Formation of Contemporary Ukrainian Literature, and Georgian-Ukrainian Literary Relations. The long-standing practice of training specialists and organizing internships in Ukraine thus became an important factor not only in the generational renewal of Georgian Ukrainian Studies but also in the transformation of its research and teaching para­digm.

At present, Ukrainian Philology is one of the modules within the MA program in Slavic Philology at TSU’s Faculty of Humanities. On the one hand, the module continues the aca­demic tradition of Ukrainian Studies established at TSU; on the other, it reflects the thematic and methodo­logical renewal of the field. The range of authors and issues studied has expanded, and the findings of contemporary Georgian and Ukrain­ian scholarship in Ukrainian Studies have been integrated into the curric­ulum. Ukrainian literature is consid­ered within a broad historical and cultural context, with particular at­tention to the formation and repre­sentation of Ukrainian national and cultural identity, Georgian-Ukrainian cultural relations, and the place of Ukrainian literature within European and world literary processes.

The research tradition of ‘literary relations’ formed during the Soviet period retained an important place in Georgian Ukrainian Studies after the collapse of the USSR, although, as noted above, its interpretive frame­work changed substantially. Research on Georgian-Ukrainian literary rela­tions is no longer limited to describ­ing the history of direct contacts, in­fluences, translations, and cultural connections. With the development of contemporary comparative litera­ture, approaches drawn from imagology, cultural studies, memory studies, and trauma studies have be­come established in research and teaching, making it possible to con­ceptualize the relationship between Georgian and Ukrainian literatures within a broader historical and cul­tural context. Alongside direct liter­ary connections, attention has also turned to typological parallels – the­matic and semantic similarities in different national literatures gener­ated by comparable historical experi­ences, cultural memories, and prob­lems of identity, without presuppos­ing direct literary contact. Thus, the traditional paradigm of ‘literary rela­tions’ has not disappeared; it has ex­panded and been supplemented by the methods of contemporary com­parative and cultural research.

Conclusion

The history of teaching Ukrainian literature at Tbilisi State University reveals a continuous but heterogene­ous process. In the 1940s, it began within the institutional frameworks of Russian literature and the ‘Litera­tures of the Peoples of the USSR’; during the 1950s-1980s, a program­matic, professional, and Georgian-language teaching base was gradually created; in the post-Soviet period, the de-ideologization of the Soviet leg­acy was accompanied by an expan­sion of the range of authors and problems studied and by methodo­logical renewal in their interpretation.

The study also reveals the contra­dictory character of Soviet educa­tional and scholarly policy: on the one hand, the system created institu­tional opportunities for teaching and researching Ukrainian literature; on the other, it determined its content and interpretation through Soviet ideological models. Within this same institutional space, however, the work of several generations of schol­ars and teachers – and especially Otar Bakanidze’s many years of scholarly and organizational activity – gradu­ally established the teaching of Ukrainian literature as an independ­ent academic field within Georgian Ukrainian Studies.

Post-Soviet transformation did not mean a complete rejection of the ac­ademic tradition formed earlier. The research direction of ‘literary rela­tions’ was retained, but its interpre­tive framework changed and ex­panded: traditional historical and contact-oriented research was sup­plemented by approaches from con­temporary comparative literature, imagology, cultural studies, memory and trauma studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies. At the same time, authors and literary phenomena that had been understudied in the Soviet period or excluded for ideo­logical reasons came to occupy an important place in teaching and re­search.

Thus, more than eight decades of teaching Ukrainian literature at TSU demonstrate not only the institutional development of the field but also the gradual transformation of an aca­demic paradigm – from teaching ini­tiated within the Soviet model of the ‘Literatures of the Peoples of the USSR’ to contemporary Ukrainian Studies, which approaches Ukrainian literature as part of an independent national culture while also situating it within European and world literary processes.

Notes

• Chkhaidze, „Migrations of the Russian Language and the State Aca­demic Institutions: Notes on Its Culti­vation and Depopularization in Georgia and Its Peripheries (Abkhazia and South Ossetia)”, Białorutenistyka Białostocka, Vol. 14, 2022, pp. 237-264.
• И. Модебадзе, Т. Мегрелишвили, „Последние «из могикан», или Кризис грузинской русистики”, TSQ, № 53, Summer 2015, pр. 113-134.
• Баканидзе, Украинистика в Тбилисском государственном университете. Научные труды, серия: филология, том ХІІІ. Санкт-Петербург, Издательство Тбилисского университета, Тбилиси, 2007, pp. 40-49.
• Луценко, „Біля чистих джерел Братерства”, Райдужними мостами. Українсько-грузинські літературні зв’язки, Київ: видавництво художньої літератури «Дніпро», 1968, pp. 217-232.
• Central Archive of Contemporary History, National Archives of Georgia, Fond No. 473, Inventory No. 21, File No. 163
• Fond No. 471, Inventory No. 21, File No. 146.
• Pipes, Communism, Translated by Levan Ghambashidze, Intelekti, Tbilisi, pp. 115-116.
• ‘Interest in Ukraine Will Never Fade in Georgia,’ interview with Prof. Otar Bakanidze by Malkhaz Chkadua. Sakartvelo/Сакартвело, No. 2(11), 2011, pp. 18-23.
• Kintsurashvili, ‘From the History of the Literary Fellowship of Ukraine and Georgia,’ manuscript, Archive of the Giorgi Leonidze State Museum of Georgian Literature, No. 25381, pp. 1-3.
• Fond No. 471, Inventory No. 21, File No. 339.
• Idem, File No. 362.
• Idem, (Minutes No. 15).
• Д. Цыганов, „Советская многонациональная литература как имперская практика”. Новое литературное обозрение, 2005, №3, 402-416.
• С. Екельчик, „Украинская истори-ческая память и советский канон: как определялось национальное наследие Украины в сталинскую эпоху”, Ab Imperio, 2/2004, 77-123.
• История украинской литературы, т. 1. Киев: Издательство Академии наук Украинской ССР, 1954. 758 p.
• Буачидзе, Программа по истории украинской и белорусской литературы. Для филологического факультета Тбилисского государс-твенного университета им. И. В. Сталина. Тбилиси, 1956, 21 p.
• Fond No. 471, Inventory No. 21, File No. 339 (folio 20).
• Nemsadze, O. Bakanidze, Department of National Literatures, Literary Relations and Translation, TSU Press, Tbilisi, 2005, pp. 33-63.
• Українська радянська література. Київ: «Вища школа», 1979, 653 p.
• Программа восточнославянских литератур. Составители: проф. О. А. Баканидзе, доц. К. К. Квачантирадзе, Издательство Тбилисского университета, Тбилиси, 1997, 32 p.

Bibliography

Archives

Archive of the Giorgi Leonidze State Museum of Georgian Literature, No. 25381, pp. 1-3.

National Archives of Georgia, Central Archive of Contemporary History, Fond No. 473.

Books

БУАЧИДЗЕ, Т. Программа по истории украинской и белорусской литературы. Для филологического факультета Тбилисского государственного университета им. И. В. Сталина. Тбилиси, 1956.

История украинской литературы, т. 1. Киев: Издательство Академии наук Украинской ССР, 1954.

ЛУЦЕНКО, І. „Біля чистих джерел Братерства”. Райдужними мостами. Українсько-грузинські літературні зв’язки. Київ: видавництво художньої літератури «Дніпро», 1968.

NEMSADZE, L., BAKANIDZE, O. Department of National Literatures, Literary Relations and Translation, TSU Press, Tbilisi, 2005.

PIPES, R. Communism, Translated by Levan Ghambashidze, Intelekti, Tbilisi.

Программа восточнославянских литератур. Составители: проф. О. А. Баканидзе, доц. К. К. Квачантирадзе. Тбилиси: Издате-льство Тбилисского университета, 1997.

Учебно-методическая программа курса «Литературы народов СССР» для государственных университетов. Москва: Высшая школа, 1962.

Українська радянська література, «Вища школа», Київ, 1979.

Studies and Articles

CHKHAIDZE, E., „Migrations of the Russian Language and the State Academic Institutions: Notes on Its Cultivation and Depopularization in Georgia and Its Peripheries (Abkhazia and South Ossetia)”, Białorutenistyka Białostocka, Vol. 14, 2022, pp. 237-264.

Newspaper Sakartvelo/Сакартвело, ‘Interest in Ukraine Will Never Fade in Georgia,’ interview with Prof. Otar Bakanidze by Malkhaz Chkadua, No. 2(11), 2011, pp. 18-23.

БАКАНИДЗЕ, О., „Украинистика в Тбилисском государственном университете”, Научные труды, серия: филология, том ХІІІ. Санкт-Петербург – Тбилиси: Издательство Тбилисского университета, 2007, pр. 40-49.

ЕКЕЛЬЧИК, С., „Украинская историческая память и советский канон: как определялось националь-ное наследие Украины в стали-нскую эпоху”, Ab Imperio, 2/2004, pр. 77-123.

МОДЕБАДЗЕ, И., МЕГРЕЛИШВИЛИ, Т., „Последние «из могикан», или Кризис грузинской русистики”, TSQ, № 53, Summer 2015, pр. 113-134.