Community and Private Spaces of Freedom in Caucasian Exile Literature

Abstract

Caucasian exile literature of the 19th century accumulates records of various ways of experiencing freedom in spite of physical enslavement. An objective, external form of manifesting freedom, often taking on a community character, was conducting a political „apostolic” mission consisting in preaching the idea of ​​freedom; conducting research and scientific work, maintaining ties with national literature, reading individual or aloud in group of exiles. No less important, however, was „touching” freedom in an individual, subjective interior: by releasing unlimited spaces of imagination and launching the creative processes of the creative „I”; thanks to dreams and memory; in love, and finally in contact with nature, which was for romantics a gateway to transcendence. The essence of these poetic visions of „liberation” is in fact the projection of a return to the Paradise.