Provincializing National Literatures: Imperial Canon Formation in Multinational Soviet Literature and Georgian Counter-Models

In April 1978, students poured into the streets of Tbilisi to block a constitutional amendment that would have downgraded Georgian from its status as the republic’s state language. Their success—rare in late Soviet politics—casts a sharp light on a broader settlement already in place: a formal rhetoric of equality alongside a cultural order that increasingly normalized a single privileged horizon, with Russian language and Russian culture positioned as the medium of the “new historical community”—the Soviet people—proclaimed by the 1977 Brezhnev Constitution.

The talk approaches this settlement through an unlikely but revealing object: the six-volume History of Multinational Soviet Literature (1970–74). Read as a meta-canonical apparatus, the History shows how “multinational literature” functioned less as a descriptive category than as a canon-making regime—codifying evaluative criteria, organizing inter-republican hierarchies, and consolidating a Russocentric center–periphery order under the banner of “unity and diversity.” Rather than treating these effects as abstract, the lecture reconstructs the concrete canon-forming mechanisms by which “multinational literature” organized inter-republican hierarchies and consolidated a Russocentric center–periphery order.

Against this framework, Georgia offers a striking archive of both complicity and exit. The talk traces three field positions embodied by three Georgian figures: Georgii Lomidze as an institutional architect of the all-Union canon; Akaki Bakradze’s late-Soviet demand to re-anchor universality in emphatic national content; and Guram Dochanashvili’s earlier, reader-centered vision of a lateral “world republic of literature-lovers.” Methodologically, the talk offers a transferable model of cultural imperialism by showing how canon-making practices provincialize “national literatures” while claiming universality—and, through the Georgian cases, it specifies the repertoire of counter-strategies of cultural self-assertion—an argument with implications for Soviet/Slavic studies, comparative and world literature, and the cultural history of empire.