Akaki Tsereteli’s Media in the Context of the Georgian Interpretations of the Argonaut Myth

Abstract

Even though old Georgian literature was familiar with the famous Argonaut cycle, the creative adaptation of this myth started in the XVIII-XIX centuries. The receptions of the Argonaut cycle presented – on one hand in Ioanne Baton- ishvili’s Kalmasoba while, on the other, in Teimuraz Batonishvili’s The History of Iveria – gave rise to two main tendencies of the interpretation of the Argo- naut mythos in Georgian culture. First one, namely Kalmasoba, follows Apol- lonius Rhodius and Euripides’ versions, depicting Argonaut’s expedition and Medea’s image. The second – Teimuraz Batonishvili’s reception incepted the tendency of Medea’s rehabilitation, according to which Medea is innocent of the murders of her brother and children.

The aim of our paper is to study Tsereteli’s poem Media in the context of Georgian receptions of the Argonaut’s cycle; and specifically to: (1) investigate the novelty of Tsereteli’s interpretation of the myth; (2) analyze the artistic pro- ductions that continue Tsereteli’s line of the interpretation of the Medea myth; (3) overview briefly the abovementioned second tendency of the myth’s recep- tion based on the ancient sources and consider the novel approach to the Argo- nauts’ myth.

The study made evident, that Tsereteli not only continued Teimuraz Baton- ishvili’s line of interpretation, but also culminated in Medea’s rehabilitation. Though the poem failed to become a successful piece of literature, this version of interpreting the Argonauts’ myth still occurred to be very viable for the Georgian culture. To confirm the thesis, the paper discusses those artistic pro- ductions which seem to be the continuation of Tsereteli’s line of interpretation, namely L. Sanikidze’s The Story of the Colchian Maiden and the drama Medea, the Operas of B. Kvernadze and A. Machavariani and the spectacle of theatre director G. Kapanadze. For these receptions two moments seem to be especially important: (1) the tendency to reflect the Argonaut myth primarily in the context of Georgia’s ethnical and historical problems and to understand this myth as the symbol relating the Georgian culture to the western civilization; (2) the attempts to rehabilitate Medea from the crimes ascribed to her by the Greek sources.

The paper studies the reworking of the Argonaut’s myth by O. Chiladze (the novel Man was Going down the Road) as the interpretation based on a new ap- proach towards a phenomenon of a mythos that differs from the above tenden- cies of the reception of the Argonauts’ myth in the Georgian culture. The author is interested in this myth not for it being a manifestation of Georgia’s past glory, but as a means for the artistic presentation of the philosophic issues. Such an approach diminishes the issue of Medea’s rehabilitation, which appeared to be the main characteristic of Tsereteli’s line of the reception of this mythic figure.