Paxton Hibben, "The Republic of Mirth" [Travel Notes on Georgia] (1921)

As I searched for accounts in various periodicals, I accidentally stumbled on this fascinating article published in the American magazine "Travel" in July 1921 (Vol. XXXVII, Issue 3). 

This travelogue was written by Paxton Hibben, prominent American diplomat, journalist and humanitarian. After graduating from Princeton and Harvard, Hibben joined the US Foreign Service and served seven years at various foreign posts in Central and South America; in 1912, after committing a number of public indiscretions, he was compelled to resign from the State Department. He then joined the Progressive Party and was involved in Theodore Roosevelt's presidential campaign. With the start of World War I, Hibben became a war correspondent and reported from several fronts. In 1918-1923, he served on a military relief commission in Armenia, visited Georgia and helped the Red Cross in its efforts to rescue children during the Russian famine of 1921-23. Returning to the US, he pursued a literary career, publishing a number of books and numerous articles. Hibben died of pneumonia in New York in 1928. 

In light of Hibben's clear anti-Bolshevik sentiments in this article, it is rather ironic that his wife agreed to the Soviet request to bury him in Moscow as a way of honoring his efforts to mitigate the effects of famine in Russia. In 1929, Hibben was given a state funeral  and buried at Moscow's Novodevichy Convent.

Hibben wrote this article less than six months after the Democratic Republic of Georgia ceased to exist in the wake of the invasion of the Bolshevik forces in February 1921.

I find it difficult to conceive the Republic of Georgia turned Bolshevist, as the press dispatches have it. It is not a preoccupation that will worry anyone else, however, for when one speaks of “Georgia” in these United States it means the district immediately surrounding Atlanta - not a toy republic lying somewhere between the Black and Caspian Seas, six thousand miles from Savannah. It is the Republic, not the State, of Georgia that the press dispatches say has turned, is turning, or will turn, Bolshevist.

The report shocks me. Somehow, the ornate and charming Georgians as I knew them seem to fit ill with the stern realities of communism. Old Prince Napoleon Murat, for example, great-great-grandson of the illustrious French marshal and whose grandmother was the last Queen of Mingrelia, teetering about on his two canes, his immense shapka of silky sheepskin bobbing from side to side as he hobbles—what will he become in a government of abstemious commissars, requiring no toastmaster at their frugal feasts? What will they all become, these handsome male butterflies in a land where every other man is a prince, when there are no more Princes and every man must work or starve?

And those dancers so vividly pictured by H. G. Wells in his description of Baku, as something exotic and peculiarly Asiatic - what a pity he did not visit Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, to recognize them as just Georgians at their favorite and common pastime!

It was, I think, the happiest life in the world—the six months I spent in Transcaucasia. Not Armenia, of course. There is nothing but horror and tragedy and despair in that pitiful land. But Georgia could not be tragic  - not even reluctantly accepting a Bolshevism it does not understand and certainly at bottom does not want. “A volatile people fond of dancing and light wines,” the description of the French in an apocryphal geography of one's childhood (how wide of the truth!), fits the Georgians like a glove. Dancing, as Wells implies, is what they do best— gilt and filigree daggers balanced on the palms, the points in the corner of each eye, they dance to the tune of a barbaric strumming of two fingers on a kettledrum, and the shrill whine of wood-wind. To dance better (I can think of no other reason) they wear long boots of soft leather, like kid gloves, with pointed toes and no heels, that lend themselves nicely to dancing, but make poor marching equipment. The tcherkaskas, too, are picturesque when the wearers are in a whirl of complicated figures. They are the long coats we are accustomed to attribute to cossacks, with wasp waist, flaring skirt, artificially squared shoulders, and a double row of pockets across the chest, where cigarettes, not cartridges, are kept dry in chased silver tubes.

I lived across the street from the barracks, where there seemed to be far more dancing than drill, more skill with daggers balanced on nose or forehead than with rifle or machine gun. Officers and men alike - frequently in one democratic company - danced by the hour, generally solo, but sometimes also in competitive pairs. It is monotonous to watch. The steps and the formal postures are always the same; the music never varies; the skill is of high uniformity. One elbow of the dancer is crooked sharply, hand stiffly outstretched against the breast, the other arm outheld, hand hanging limp like a kerchief - goodness knows by what obscure symbolism: heel and toe, heel and toe, round and round he goes, the skirted tcherkaskas swinging out like a bell. And then the dagger stunts—always the same tricks, of which they never seem to weary. A childlike people!

As for the light wines - they are the best I know anywhere, and at 40 cents the quart, in restaurants. They all come numbered, and it is by the number you order: 66 is white, like a Moselwein. The first word learned by visiting naval officers from vessels stationed at Batum they pronounce shitysatshest—and the clever Georgians understand at once and produce 66. For the more initiated, there is 47—red, like the heavier Algerian wines of French Africa. There are others, less in demand among the foreigners because slightly resinated, as are the Greek vins du pays. These are the wines of Kakhetia, especially beloved by the Georgians themselves.

After nine months of British military occupation, 66 and 47 grew rare, and frequently one was forced to accept the Kakhetian wine. But if one shied at the taste, the Georgians knew a trick or two. They made a krushon—a sort of cup—of it, in a great pot-bellied glass bowl, with a hammered silver ladle. To soften the taste of resin, slices of peaches, pears, cucumbers, apples, or oranges were added, and whole cherries, while to give the krushonstrength, a generous dash of cognac was poured in, and, when obtainable, a liqueur or two to sweeten lit up. Nectar! Served with a cake of ice floating about, krushon is of deceptive potency. Almost anyone is ready to dance, Georgian or any other style, before the glass bowl is half empty.

To the Georgians, however, krushon is a drink for women and foreigners. They prefer the strawberry-colored Kakhetian wine, with all its violin-bow tang of resin. A round of drinks in the Georgian Club, sitting at little tables under the starry sky, is not a bottle and four or five glasses, but a bottle for each man. Nor are the tedious gyrations of the western corkscrew to be tolerated. An effete invention of one-handed drinkers! The dagger, always hanging from a gorgeous belt at the waist—not on one hip, but precisely in the center of the body—is your true Georgian’s bottle opener. A single blow, and the top of the bottle goes spinning, not a drop spilled or a grain of glass in the wine.

“No delays this way,” the handsome Georgian Prince (they are all Princes) explains. “One might die of thirst, otherwise.”

Vodka there is, of course, but not the aromatic zoobrovka of pre-war days, alas! Only the raw petrol-tasting product of potato or barley, like nothing so much as the secret distillations of the

amateur violator of the 18th amendment. The cognac is better. Indeed, it is quite as good as the usual French brands, and in the days before the war was frequently bottled and sold with French labels—and no one the wiser.

If dancing is the recreation of the volatile Georgians, drinking seems the principal business transacted. It is done earnestly and with an application which, in a less enlightened land, leads only to excessive income taxes. No one has ever seen a Georgian drunk— there are only twenty-four hours in the day and they are not enough to produce intoxication in such sincere drinkers. Besides, if ever a Georgian did get drunk, who would be left sober to record the miracle?

And as they drink, they sing—sing beautifully, with the clear voices of mountaineers—the sentimental ballads of the type our grandmothers sang, or the infinitely sad folk songs of a people in slavery. Music is as much the life of a Georgian as his food. The opera at Tiflis is an amazing structure of mingled late Persian and early Norddeutscher Lloyd architecture, set in a garden with trees and a pebbled enclosure, dotted with iron tables where one may sit and have a krushon between the acts.

[...]

Moreover, the Russian Art Theatre in Tifiis gave the best of Russian drama. And there was the Artistic Club, ubiquitous in Russia, where, after the opera or play, stage favorites met poets, singers, or just people fond of music and the theatre. There, for the sheer love of the thing, extra numbers were given by professionals and amateurs alike, with a spontaneity which certain Parisian cafés counterfeit. The music halls of Tiflis were tawdry and undistinguished. Russia patronizes the music hall. but produces no vaudeville talent to speak of. The Russian circuit was ever the gold mine of American negro buck and wing dancers, vapid English song and dance artists (you know that kick!), and the inextinguishable French whiner of interminable pathetic love songs or semi-indecent comic couplets. all on the same tune. The war cut off the supply of these performers, with the result that the program of the Tiflis music hall was a poor thing at best. But it is, after all, not to see but to be seen that a Georgian frequents a music hall. The private boxes are open to the main body of the hall at just a height to make the occupants most visible and most conspicuous. In these the handsome Georgian Princes, interspersed with visiting naval officers from allied ships, discussed krushon and sang in opposition to the performance on the stage.

Parties in Tiflis had a habit of lasting until dawn, not so much from any undue gaiety, but because they rarely began before midnight, when dinner ends.

After all, as I look back on the days in Transcaucasia, what stands out in memory is neither the bathing beach at Batum, where the question of propriety in bathing suits is simply solved by their being none  at all for rich and poor alike, nor the universal beauty of the Georgian women, from whose number from time immemorial the wealthiest Turks have sought the flowers of their harems. It is the food! To find in the Near East where, from Greece and Serbia to Persia, the food is horrible - inedible mutton in forty styles, and vegetables cooked in mutton tallow and served swimming in oil - to find in Georgia such food as exists nowhere else in the world, is a double delight. First, there is, of course, caviar. Caviar comes from the Caspian, a few hours by train from Tiflis. There, it is really fresh—and he who does not know fresh caviar on its native, so to speak, heath has not lived. You may buy a cupful for thirty cents, served with chopped onion and just a few drops of lemon, or spread on buckwheat cakes, with drawn butter and sour cream. Let those who have not tasted the dish of the gods turn up their noses. I’ve heard them say before now: “How can you eat such a devilish mixture!"— until they tried it.

Then there is sturgeon for those who like it, although in my estimation it was sturgeon that first justified the slang expression "a poor fish.” But to set off against the overrated sturgeon are the trout of Lake Gochka—extraordinary speckled-scaled, pink fleshed things that the Georgians serve with a nut sauce that few products of the cuisine equal and none excels. Rabchiki—I do not know what a "rabchik" is, plover, perhaps—hazel-hen, the dictionary says—but whatever the fowl may be, he or she (there are no capons) is beyond compare.

And such fruit as not even California boasts—and California is not backward about boasting. The Georgians make a great ceremony of peeling you a pear or a peach-—or a cucumber, to eat as if it were an apple—and handing it to you on a fork with all solemnity. It is a deplorable habit, especially at a large dinner, when each Georgian thinks he must perform the rite out of sheer politeness, for there are so many other and better things to eat than fruit, however excellent. Venison, partridges, duck, quail, wild goose or rabbits, are all to be had for a day’s shooting a few hours from Tiflis. Turkeys are more common than strictly fresh eggs in the United States—and not much more expensive.

Most succulent of all, however, are the soups, each a meal in itself—red borsch, with a clot of sour cream floating in the savory dish, or thick, odoriferous stschi, king of soups the world over. And for dessert, it is quite possible that the original famous “Georgia watermelon" came, not from the state lying east of Alabama, but from the Georgian Republic.

The cook who performs the infinite variety of culinary miracles costs the munificent sum of $2 per month in wages—and at that one is accused of debauching the labor market by paying extravagant rates!

A city of night life, Tiflis. The shops struggle open about nine and stagger through a hard morning, scarcely visited before eleven. At three, they close permanently, for all Tiflis goes to lunch at that hour, and returns no more during the day. There was little in the shops, after five years of war and blockade—mostly second-hand articles: field glasses at a song; cameras (but no films of later vintage than 1914) ; jewelry of all kinds, paintings, silverware, ball dresses (no need for these now!), wine-stained tablecloths, pawned after one meal to get the next—even the precious hypodermics of the addicts went the same way in order to obtain the drug of oblivion and the addicts were reduced to snuffing.

There was one large cooperative restaurant in Tiflis where students, teachers, public officials and others receiving small salaries, or none, could obtain a satisfying meal at eight cents. The patrons took turns waiting at table and washing the dishes, and expenses were accordingly light but the food was excellent. I have seen cabinet ministers there, solemnly doing their trick at dish washing, like the rest. Dinner is at ten o'clock, and there is little else to do afterwards, if one be not of roystering turn.

It is sad to think of it all changed—no more 66 or 47 ; under Soviet rule, prohibition is not an excuse for law-breaking— it is a fact. But, after all, the rest remains. All nights and matinees at the opera or ballet will be for workers, instead of once or twice a week. But opera and ballet will go on. There will still be the beautiful women (and no one has yet charged the Bolsheviki with requiring bathing suits), the ideal climate, the exquisite fruit—and the cooking.

Also, I think that even communism will dash itself to pieces against the charming, delightful, care-free laziness of the Georgian character. They inhabit an earthly paradise - why should they work—even for Lenin or Trotzky?