IX საუკუნის კავკასია გერმანელ მკვლევართა ნაწერებში

Abstract

The object of research is a book published in the German Democratic Republic in 1987 – „Reisen im Kaukasus“ (Travel to Caucasus), dedicated to the 19th century German travelers and explorers, who travelled to the Caucasus numerous times for the purpose of studying this region. Frequently, these scholars travelled to the Caucasus despite great risks and threats to their lives. The paper is informative and aims to introduce the Georgian society to the thematic aspects provided in the book in the form of twenty abstracts from the works of German scholars working in diverse fields. The authors with University education in the XIX century Europe – Adolf Bastian, Moritz von Kotzebue, Julius von Klaproth, Gustav Radde, Moritz Wagner, Gustav Radde, Rudolf Virchow, Karl Koch, Fridrich von Bayern and others, as well as poets Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt and Arthur Leist – were members of the academies in Germany and St. Petersburg, Russian Empire. Publication of their notes, diaries and personal letters in Leipzig in the period of German Democratic Republic, and, above all, the transfer of texts from Gothic into Latin script, is considered the first and so far unique attempt of this kind, whereas the book itself is regarded as a bibliographical rarity. The abstracts provided in the book refer to the following themes: a) location of the Caucasus – according to Julius von Klaproth, “the most wonderful and the least known region of the old world“ b) the archeological excavations of Friedrich Kolenati and the burial grounds discovered by him, in most cases already robbed by Russian expeditions; c) the unimpaired plant cover of the Alpine zone, “the captivating beauty” of which is proved by the herbarium composed by Moritz Wagner; d) collections of “colourful butterflies” and “foreign species of grasshoppers” „never discovered in the European Alps“ by Friedrich Wilhelm Parrot; e) the inhabitants of the Caucasus, described by Adolf Bastian as “rather gloomy and morose highlanders, Chechens, Kabardians, Ossetians and people of other ethnicities that are hard to distinguish from one another“; f) illustration material consisting of photographs made from daguerrotypes by unknown authors, sketches and maps; g) poems by Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt and Arthur Leist, inspired by the charm of Caucasian wildlife. Another object of research is the language of the original text, which has preserved the spelling rules of the 19th century, archaic vocabulary, vast syntactic periods, loquacious passages, Russianisms and Russian-influenced versions of toponyms.