some reform and for Georgians to struggle to that end. They understood that the key to success lay in their campaign to win the hearts and minds of youths like Joseph.
As editors and publishers they were very enterprising. The Imperial censorship was a patchy phenomenon. Tight and intrusive in St Petersburg, it was slacker in Georgia and Finland. The harsh control over ideas in the Seminary was not replicated outside its walls. Although overtly nationalist works were picked out for attention, pieces on social, economic and historical themes were permitted to appear. Before the turn of the century, moreover, the chief perceived danger to the Romanovs was thought to come from those intellectuals who called for armed struggle, regional autonomy or even secession from the Russian Empire. Chavchavadze offered no direct challenge to the monarchy or the social order. But the Marxists too were deemed to be not unduly menacing since they appeared to be preoccupied with social and economic grievances; none of them demanded Georgian territorial autonomy, far less independence. The chief censor in Tbilisi, Giorgi Zhiruli, cheerfully admitted to his ignorance of Marxism. In such an environment it was possible to have a lively public debate. Marxists in Russia had to content themselves with thick journals published in St Petersburg and with intermittently appearing emigre newspapers.19 The debate for the soul of the Georgian nation was intense as conservatives, liberals and socialists contended with each other.
Joseph Dzhughashvili was more confident than most first-year seminarists. He had begun to write his own verses, and quickly after arriving in Tbilisi he set about trying to get them published. His themes were nature, land and patriotism. Ilya Chavchavadze appreciated his talent. Joseph’s first printed poem, ‘To the Moon’, appeared in the magazine
The poem ‘Morning’ was a touching work written in the romantic literary style then conventional in Georgian literary circles:21
Nobody would claim that this in translation is high art; but in the Georgian original it has a linguistic purity recognised by all. The themes of nature and nation commended themselves to readers. The educationist Yakob Gogebashvili, who had contacts with revolutionaries in Tbilisi,22 valued the poem so highly that he included it in the later editions of his school textbook,
There was a nationalist edge to Joseph’s poems even though he restrained himself in order to avoid annoying the Tbilisi censor. His images were those of many writers in the oppressed countries of Europe and Asia of that time: mountain, sky, eagle, motherland, songs, dreams and the solitary traveller. The closest he came to disclosing his political orientation was in an untitled work dedicated to ‘the poet and singer of peasant labour, Count Rapael Eristavi’. For Joseph, Eristavi had identified himself with the plight of the poor toilers of the Georgian countryside.24
Eristavi, born in 1824, was an ethnographer and folklorist as well as poet. His focus on the need for social and economic reform made him an unmistakable opponent of the status quo in the Russian Empire. According to one of Joseph’s fellow seminarists, the poem dedicated to Eristavi was interpreted as revolutionary in content.25 This may be an exaggeration. But Joseph was undeniably offering a work intended to criticise the status quo.
The legend of a rejected Georgian youth was a figment of Stalin’s imagination. He was welcomed by the Georgian cultural elite. As soon as he left Gori, there was no going back except for holidays. Tbilisi offered the promise of realised ambition. His friends, whether they had come from rich or poor backgrounds, felt the same. They had an eagerness to make a mark in the world outside the town of their birth.
Stalin later made out that he and his comrades crept into Chichinadze’s shop and, short of funds, surreptitiously copied out the forbidden texts into their notebooks. Supposedly they did this in relays to relieve the pain to their hands. A less likely situation is hard to imagine in a well-ordered enterprise. (Not that this has stopped biographers from taking the story at its face value.) Chichinadze was on the side of those who opposed the Russian establishment in Tbilisi. When the seminarists came on to his premises, he surely greeted them warmly; and if copying took place, it must have been with his express or implicit permission.26 The spread of ideas was more important to the metropolitan intellectual elite than mere profit. It was a battle the liberals could scarcely help winning. Chichinadze’s shop was a treasure house of the sort of books the youngsters wanted. Joseph Dzhughashvili was fond of Victor Hugo’s
According to his friend Iremashvili, the group also got hold of texts by Marx, Darwin, Plekhanov and Lenin.28 Stalin told of this in 1938, claiming that each member paid five kopeks to borrow the first volume of Marx’s
As his time in the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary drew to an end, Joseph had become thoroughly alienated from the authorities. He had ceased to study hard from his second year when he became involved in writing and publishing.30 He was also drawing back from the world of literature. Despite the patronage of Ilya Chavchavadze and Giorgi Tsereteli, he no longer sought to be a poet. He tossed aside the opportunity to join the Georgian cultural elite. Instead he intensified his studies of socialism, politics and economics. Having hurtled like a small meteor across the Tbilisi literary scene in 1895–6, he just as suddenly disappeared. It would appear that he entirely stopped composing poetry. Few people apart from his publishers and his close friends at the Seminary had an inkling that he had ever published any. (When Yakob Gogebashvili reprinted ‘Morning’ in 1912, it was under the
