Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 147 h Diaghilev’s Scheherazade and Russian Orientalism sianized. One of the most prominent was Baku, due to the discovery of the Caspian oil much earlier than in Iran, or in America, which triggered the inter- est of the world’s magnates, mainly from Russia, as these areas of Azerbaijan were a part of the Russian Empire by that time. 23 Tbilisi had become the Rus- sian capital in the Caucasus even earlier, since the end of the eighteenth cen- tury after the last Russo-Ottoman war. The double or triple identities of Russian Azerbaijan and Georgia had similar features: before becoming Russian subjects, both had been a part of the Persian and Ottoman Empires for several centuries. Inevitably simpli- fying the very complicated matter, it should be mentioned that such long- term experiences of being under the pressure of a bigger empire might have helped the already multi-ethnic smaller nations to resist alien influences, consolidate their survival skills to be able to preserve their own cultural identity. Vepkhistqaosani, Abesalom and Eteri Inevitably both nations absorbed some of the features of the domineering cul- tural traditions. Although in Georgia there was a natural tendency towards their Orthodox co-confessionalists in Russia, there was a strong movement of national revival reflected in visual, dramatic, and music art based on the originally Georgian literary material. For example, among the Georgian nobi­ lity it became quite a common pastime to entertain themselves with staging very European-style tableau vivants, which were imitating the episodes from Rustaveli’s Vepkhistqaosani (‘Knight in the Tiger Jacket’). One of those who was heavily involved in professional design of the costumes and decor of such tableaux vivants was the Hungarian artist Mihály Zichy, who by that time was a Russian court artist. In 1881, he arrived in Georgia from St Petersburg to work on the series of illustrations for Rustaveli’s poem, for which he produced 35 paintings. The music for the first national opera Abesalom da Eteri (‘Abesalom and Eteri’) in Georgian was composed by Zacharia Paliashvili, who started it in early 1900 but finished it only after the Bolshevik Revolution. It was pre- miered in 1919 and was based on the folk story about the tragic love of peas- ant girl Eter and Prince Abesalom. Paliashvili studied music in his hometown Kutaisi and then in Moscow with Sergei Taneyev. While he used several folk 23 The first oil towers were erected in the Caspian already in 1803. By the end of the nineteenth century the industry was run by several successful businessmen and their families among whom there were prominent patrons of art: Robert Nobel, Alexander Mantashev, Stepan Lianozov, Zey- nalabdin Taghiyev, Murtuza Mukhtarov, Musa Naghiyev, and several others.