YEREVAN–PARIS – Irina Petrovna Dzutsova (born in 1941, Tbilisi) is an Ossetian historian and philologist by education, Doctor of Art History. From 1966 to 1970 she worked at the Russian newspaper Vecherny Tbilisi (Evening Tbilisi). For many years she was the Georgia correspondent of the journal Decorative Art of the USSR. From 1970 to 2009 she worked at the Art Museum of Georgia. She founded and headed the manuscript and memoirs department, significantly enriching it with materials from the personal archives of artists and scholars. She was a member of the Union of Artists of Georgia. Since 1966 she has published in the press of Georgia, Armenia, Russia, England, France, the US and Serbia. An author of number of books in Russian and Georgian on the history of Georgian fine arts, Dzutsova writes widely on the history of Georgia’s cultural and artistic ties with other countries. She has participated in international symposia, conferences, scholarly sessions, and collective volumes on art and cultural history. Since 2010 she has lived in Paris and continues to write books and articles.
Dear Irina Petrovna, I have been reading your articles on Armenian artists for many years and would like to thank you for your professional assessments and numerous discoveries related to masters of the past. You are an Ossetian from Georgia, married to an Armenian, you write in Russian, and now live in France. I believe multiculturalism enriches a person and largely shapes one’s character. How has it influenced you?
In Tbilisi, a historically multinational and multiconfessional city situated at the crossroads of European, Russian and Persian cultures, and one that has proven its ability to absorb and embrace the best and brightest elements of this unique cultural “fabric,” it is impossible to live and work outside this phenomenon of cultural and linguistic diversity. For example, my father-in-law, Varos Yengoyan, was fluent in Armenian, Georgian, Russian, Persian and Turkish.
By learning about others — our compatriots, their culture, customs, and ways of life — a person undoubtedly broadens his horizons, enriches his worldview, and expands his creative potential. My personal and professional development would have been very different had I lived in another cultural environment. In this sense, Georgia, and Tbilisi in particular, is a rather unique phenomenon: peoples here have always lived side by side — not in parallel, but truly together — not in a “melting pot” in the American sense, but while preserving their identity, forming mixed families, and looking at the “other” not with suspicion, but with goodwill.
There were, of course, difficult moments after the collapse of the USSR and the surge of ultra-nationalism. However, I believe that the spirit of “internationalism” characteristic of Georgia prevailed over politically short-sighted nationalist fervor, which, as history shows, can only lead into a deep abyss.
Everyone I have had the good fortune to know is a product of this cultural and ethnic diversity — for example, Sergei Parajanov: an ethnic Armenian, a native of Tiflis, Russian-speaking, who celebrated the Hutsuls, the great Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani, trilingual Sayat-Nova and Lermontov’s Ashik-Kerib, a hero of Caucasian and Central Asian epics.
