Road and Contact: 19th Century Prose and Pandemics

Abstract

In 1829, A. Pushkin traveled around the South Caucasus and wrote “A Journey to Erzurum”(1836). Two years after Pushkin’s journey, Georgian Romanticist poet G. Orbeliani detailed his travel to Russia in “My travel from Tbilisi to Peterburg” (1831–1839). The poets traveled through the road, had physical as well as cultural “contact” on the road as Platt and Bakhtin note, and depicted their own experiences in their travelogues including the plague epidemic in the region. Because the Russian empire connected the occupied territories with roads, the function of road, where “contact” occurred, is significant to discussions of 19th-century Georgian and other literature(s).