Ilia State University
Professor Emerita
Cultural Studies, Art History
Doctor of Historical Sciences
Tbilisi, Georgia
nino_abakelia@iliauni.edu.ge
Abstract
The study of Ilia Chavchavadze’s “Bazaleti Lake” from an interdisciplinary perspective The paper offers an interdisciplinary reading of Ilia Chavchavadze's poem Lake Bazaleti (1883), bringing together literary theory (intertextuality), ethnography, and the history of religious-mythological imagery. It treats the text not as a self-sufficient literary unit but as a trans-linguistic construct that draws upon antecedent and synchronic texts and unfolds within a network of textual relations. Using ethnography as a method and intertextuality as a theoretical idiom, the study traces the mythological and cosmological substrata that underlie the poem's surface imagery and demonstrates how an archaic mythologeme is recoded in a new historical and political context. At the heart of the text stands a paradisiacal garden submerged in the waters of Lake Bazaleti — a locus amoenus enclosing a sacred center embodied by a golden cradle and the infant lying within it. The article reconstructs the broader mythological field to which this image belongs, including the Georgian mythologemes of the sacred gardens. In each instance, the garden functions as a bounded, sacralized space associated with abundance, immutability, and primordial bliss, organized around a sacred center. The article argues that, when this ancient cosmological fragment is placed within the socio-political context of nineteenth-century Georgia — a country deprived of its statehood, ecclesiastical autocephaly, and the public use of its language under Russian imperial rule — the inherited mythologeme is transformed into an ideologeme. Writing during the period that Joep Leerssen has termed the cultivation of culture, Chavchavadze does not merely retell a familiar legend; he reactivates a cosmological schema in order to address an "imagined community." The submerged garden becomes an image of a dormant nation, the cradled infant a figure of the awaited redeemer, and the poem itself a vehicle for the mobilization of collective action. It explains why a poem about a submerged garden with a sleeping infant could not have been pastoral or neutral in 1883, and it provides the article's argument move: the passage from mythologeme to ideologeme. By tracking the movement from mythologeme to ideologeme, the article shows how meaning and function are transformed within textual space, and how the figure of Ilia Chavchavadze emerges as a great communicator between the archaic past and a politically charged modern future — a disseminator of progressive ideas whose poetic recourse to primordial imagery serves the consolidation of cultural identity and the stimulation of national self-awareness.