The Public and Private Truth of the Folk Reciter

Abstract

It is well known to the public that the poetry of Mikha Khelashvili, an anti-Soviet poet who fought for freedom, survived the Soviet era thanks to his friend Vano Khornauli – a collector of folk poetry and himself a folk reciter. Today it is already told as legend that, the day before his death, Khelashvili asked his sister to hand over a leather bag full of his own manuscripts to the young, nineteen-year-old Vano Khornauli, so that his poems would not fall into the hands of the Cheka agents during a search, and that Khornauli would properly take care of them. It is likewise known that, for nearly seventy years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Khornauli kept Khelashvili’s poems hidden in a hollow of a cliff in his native village, forbidding even his own children from going near that cliff, telling them that evil spirits lived there; after the attainment of independence, he handed over Khelashvili’s collection of poetry to the National Library. Since then, several collections of Mikha Khelashvili’s work have been published, and almost every time supplemented with newly discovered poems.
This paper publishes for the first time a poem by Mikha Khelashvili contained in a notebook of folk poetry that Vano Khornauli sent in 1934 to the editorial office of the newspaper „Collectivization“ – a poem that the newspaper›s editorial staff immediately suppressed and handed over to the archive as the work of an anti-Soviet poet. The collection of poems is accompanied by a letter from Khornauli to the newspaper›s editor, in which he speaks of the harassment and persecution he suffered at the hands of his fellow villagers on account of the truth.
The study has shown that a man was persecuted by fellow Pshavs for the loyalty and cooperation he displayed toward the Soviet authorities – a man who, at great risk and, presumably, at the cost of fear, saw in this an essential foundation for an independent Georgia; who saw, in the legacy of a former deacon irreconcilable with Russia›s aggressive policy, a comrade-in-arms of Kakutsa Cholokashvili and a poet of freedom, a symbol of unyielding resistance to the enemy. As the guardian of this precious treasure, he spent his entire life in the village of Katsalkhevi, gathering examples of Pshav-Khevsurian poetry, while himself writing verses about the Soviet leaders and about communism, enduring persecution and mockery – and, at the same time, fulfilling to the end the request left to him by a friend who stood in the „opposite camp“.
In this paper, Vano Khornauli›s „truth“ is examined as the declared, public truth shared by hundreds of folk reciters of the Soviet era – in Michel Foucault›s term, a „discursive formation“ of power. Accordingly, the creative work of these folk reciters appears as „variants“ of one another not because variation is one of the chief specific features of folklore, but because each of them repeats the inner discursive structure of Soviet propaganda and fits within a corresponding thematic and artistic framework – a fact that, in effect, excludes any possibility of improvisation on the part of the reciter. Vano Khornauli›s secret, concealed from the Soviet authorities – together with his loyalty to his friend – is understood as his own personal space of resistance, one that he did not yield to the system, and as a personal truth maintained in order to preserve his identity.