FOR THE HISTORY OF THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF FOLKLORE IN GEORGIA

Abstract

Vakhtang Kotetishvili is widely acknowledged as the founding father of Georgian folkloristics, and both his intellectual achievements and biographical trajectory are well established within the national historiography of culture. The narrative of his conflict with the Soviet folklorist Mikheil Chikovani is also well documented. Nevertheless, the origins, development, and culmination of this confrontation remain largely obscured, as no systematic scholarly investigation has yet addressed them.  This lacuna can be attributed to two main factors. First, Mikheil Chikovani’s long-standing leadership of Georgian folkloristics from 1936 to 1983 shaped the institutional and intellectual landscape of the discipline. Second, in post-Soviet Georgia, folklorists have generally avoided research on the history of their own field, prioritizing the study of folklore itself. Temur Jagodnishvili remains the only scholar to have undertaken a comprehensive study of Georgian folkloristics from the nineteenth century through the 1930s–1940s, including aspects of Soviet-era  folkloristics; however, this line of inquiry was never continued by him.                                                                                      

This study examines the institutionalization of Georgian folkloristics as a philological scientific discipline during the 1930s—a process that unfolded within the context of the Kotetishvili–Chikovani conflict and culminated in Kotetishvili’s repression.                                  

The research is largely based on hitherto unknown or unpublished archival materials dispersed across the National Archives of Georgia, the archives of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, and the Museum of Georgian Literature.These sources include proceedings of meetings,scholarly reports, and personal diaries, which are presented and critically analyzed in a retrospective framework. 

The research demonstrates that the Soviet authorities systematically opposed Vakhtang Kotetishvili, who embodied scholarly independence, intellectual creativity, and erudition, through Mikheil Chikovani—a figure cultivated within the Soviet ideological system.        

Keywords: Soviet Folklore; Vakhtang Kotetoshvili; Mikheil Chikovani; “ELKHI”; Folklore Department.