CRRC, American Councils and ARISC are pleased to announce the 8th session of the Fall 2024 Tbilisi Works-in-Progress series!
This week’s session will be in hybrid format in-person at CRRC Georgia and online.
The Brothers Karbelashvili: Family, Faith and Nation in the Shadow of the Russian Empire (1884-1924)
Rebecca Mitchell, Middlebury College
Amid the recently established Bolshevik government’s violent suppression of a popular uprising in 1924, Georgian Orthodox priest Vasili Karbelashvili penned a passionate letter to his former student at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary: Joseph Stalin. It was a desperate bid to arrest the silencing of Georgian culture and religion by the new regime. Could Karbelashvili reawaken Stalin’s loyalty to his homeland through appealing to shared national pride? While Karbelashvili’s personal missive to Stalin remained unanswered, delegated to a dusty corner of the archive, by 2011 his words had taken on a prophetic tone. For their work in protecting Georgia’s national heritage from erasure in both Russian and Soviet eras, Vasili and his four brothers (Pilimon, Andria, Polievktos, Petre) were canonized by the Georgian Orthodox Church. In this talk drawn from the speaker’s current book project, she offers a microhistory of the Karbelashvili family in the final years of the Russian Empire, tracing how national and religious identities were fused into a Georgian anti-imperial self-consciousness within an intimate family circle. She further probes how this elision of national and religious identities failed to resonate with the emergent Bolshevik regime.
Rebecca Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and chapters, as well as two monographs: Sergei Rachmaninoff (Reaktion Press, 2022) and Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2015). Nietzsche’s Orphans was awarded the 2016 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for a first monograph “that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past”. Her current research uses sacred chant as a lens through which to explore local, regional, national and religious forms of identity in the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union, with particular focus on the South Caucasus (Georgia). She has received research funding from numerous sources, including the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC), the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.
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Works-in-Progress is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the CRRC office at Chavchavadze Ave. 5 and online. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), the American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). All of the talks are free and open to the public.
In observation of the spirit of the Chatham House Rule, the talks will not be recorded, and we courteously request that the other participants refrain from recording and/or distributing recordings as well. The opinions expressed in WiP talks are those of the speakers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRRC, ARISC or of American Councils
WiP: “The Brothers Karbelashvili: Family, Faith and Nation in the Shadow of the Russian Empire (1884-1924)”
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