Between National and Social Liberation: The Legend of Surami Fortress From Daniel Chonkadze to Sergei Parajanov

• In Event: Sergei Parajanov between National Liberation and Cosmopolitan Coexistence

Abstract

This paper proposes an intertextual and intermedial analysis of Sergei Parajanov’s film The Legend of Surami Fortress (1985) alongside its literary source Daniel Chonkadze’s novella of 1859 The Fortress of Surami and Ivan Perestiani’s 1922 silent film adaptation The Fortress of Surami. These three works are united by more than their treatment of the same core narrative: each also appeared at major watersheds in Georgian and Russian history, whose allegorical reflection they can also be seen to represent. In treating core questions of social identity and solidarity, however, they crucially equivocate between social distinctions based on class, national distinctions based on ethnicity, and a transregional cosmopolitanism rooted in older histories of multiethnic coexistence. Parajanov’s own Caucasian works thus resonate at the end of an older literary-visual history, a moment during which Soviet-era formulations of social and national belonging appeared open to new stylistic solutions.

Author

• Harsha Ram, UC Berkeley