Russia's Latin Lover
by Daria Vaisman
 

Returning from a trip to the highlands—force-fed shashlyk and wine until half-blind—a friend once compared Georgian hospitality to a subtle form of hostage-taking. (Another friend recently told me of going to the post office with a package. “Why are you sending this?” the woman asked). As inappropriately friendly countries go, Georgia ranks near the top. But combine the Georgian impulse to feed and fete with the Georgian man, and you’re left with something else: chivalry.

For as long as there has been the Russian writer, there has been the Georgian man, a character whose rakishness and louche, irresistible contempt have occupied the Slavic imagination for centuries. In sheer marketability, only the Italian man has come close. And while I can personally attest that much of the stereotype is, in fact, true, the Georgian man is in large part a PR invention that starts, like most things in Georgia, with God. 

When God was giving out land, the story goes, the Georgians were so busy feasting that they missed their turn on line. When they explained to God that they were feasting to Him—capisce?—the Lord gave them the piece of real estate He’d been saving for Himself. A quick scan of the formerly Soviet landscape, and you have to admit that the Georgians make a point. While most of the territory is a vast and featureless place—misery soaked into the land itself, if you go in for pathetic fallacies—Georgia is all wine and mountain and sun. This, of course, affected the Georgian people, and had the Soviet Union had novelty stores (or irony), it would have also had “Georgia is for Lovers” mugs.

So in the Soviet system of economic specialization, where each country was designated with a primary commodity to produce, Georgia’s was pleasure. If you wanted to drill oil, weaponize anthrax, or find a suitably desolate site on which to build a gulag, you went somewhere else. But if you were in the mood to catch a puppet show, get pleasantly buzzed on homemade wine, or eat an outstanding peach, Georgia was your place. The food was better here, the weather balmier, the people charmingly nuts. It was here that Pushkin wrote his sappiest love poetry (“The night mist lies on the hills of Georgia/…The heart burns and beats again”), Dumas soaked at the sulphur baths (''Why does not Paris, the city of physical pleasures, have such baths?” he asked), and Stalin perfected his early Che role, robbing banks and otherwise impressing the ladies. (One wonders how differently things would have turned out had he not gone straight.) Go to the most godforsaken corner of the former Soviet Union now and you will find a merrily painted Georgian restaurant occupying the same social need, and found with the same frequency, as an Irish pub.

All this was excellent marketing for one product in particular: the Georgian man. Watch a Russian film from those days and you get the idea. The Georgian men in these movies are always either capricious and lovelorn or charming and criminal. To the Russian woman, the Georgian man was a construction out of Rousseau: virile, vital, alive. This was the man who would beat up your ex-boyfriend (or husband), leave flowers outside your door, and write a song with your name for the chorus. His was the sin of excess, never omission—the European troubadour’s patience with the added benefit of proximity. Every summer in Abkhazia (a Soviet vacation spot before being lost by Georgia to war and secessionist politics), this led to a mutually beneficial arrangement between the Russian and Georgian republics. Know that story where the flushed American teenager, teetering on the brink of her virginity, loses it on vacation in Italy? This was the Soviet version in a nutshell.

As with the other non-Russian republics, there was an element of race hovering over the whole affair; at its ugliest, there were references to color and character that still touch a nerve. Just-resigned Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili explored this wound—turning, in his singular way, the political into the psychological—in a recent speech: “Russia loves Georgians at the table,” he said, “but they consider Georgians who have stood tall … to be some kind of unnatural phenomenon.” A quick Google search on the topic unearths articles with titles like “Eros and Empire” and dutiful references to Edward Said. But while English colonialists were busy fetishizing the dusk-eyed ladies, Russian writers couldn’t stop going on about the men. (Put another way, had either homosexuality or critical theory been given the chance to flourish, doubtless there would have been a Soviet Mapplethorpe to photograph the Georgian nude, and a graduate student to write about it.)

Twenty years later, the Russians have left—but the other foreigners have arrived. Abkhazia is now closed off to Georgians, and with new travel possibilities, the Russians have swapped out Georgians for Turkish men. And yet the Georgian male charm seems to have been translated intact: of the expat women I know here, about half have ended up married, pregnant, or otherwise enmeshed. For years now, Georgia’s biggest export (besides scrap metal) has been boyfriends.

Expat women—refugees from the parsimony and suspicion that often characterizes dating back home—find Georgian men awfully compelling. Clichés aside, they quickly learn that to date a Georgian man is to be worshipped—from up close or from afar, if you are, say, at work or buying groceries. A two-day business trip will elicit text messages of such touching mournfulness and delightful syntax that you will happily lay out the snacks when his friends arrive at two in the morning to finish the good wine and fall asleep on your clothes. He’s your very own Latin Lover, and if there is a language gap, all the better; when you don’t know what he’s saying, he’s only as wonderful as your imagination allows.

Are there other places that so commonly upend the status quo of native woman ensnares foreign man? Discounting the Gambia or the Jamaica in How Stella Got Her Groove Back as part of a highly imbalanced sex trade, an informal survey finds just one: the Balkans, where men evidently offer the same mixture of reverence and good, old fashioned machismo. Doors will be opened, cigarettes lit from across the room. Bills will be paid without giving you so much as a chance to leave a tip. It’s the stuff you smirk at in 1950s movies, feeling pleasantly evolved. If you've never left the U.S., you’ve probably never seen it in its live state. But then you start to wonder—is this what women really want?

If you’re Russian, chances are, yes. Russian women are sick of feminism the way Iranians are probably sick of religion. To most post-Soviet women, feminism is not equal pay for equal work and other perfectly reasonable demands. It’s the strain of living in a matriarchal society where only the women know it. No wonder that there’s been a boom trade in how-to-catch-an-oligarch classes in Moscow—Russian women are tired. And Georgian men provide them with a much-needed rest.

All this gets more complicated when the Western woman is involved. For those bred on gender equality, Georgia’s dark corners are something you’re taught to despise.

Date rape—a concept rooted in the tautology of No Means No—here is explored for deeper meanings. Watch Georgia’s national dance—the woman fluttering like wounded pigeons, legs hidden under skirts as the men circle athletically around—and you understand why. In Georgia, no actually doesn’t mean no: protest is the national form of flirtation.

Not surprisingly, sex is a lurid, heated, furtive affair. In Georgian, the verb “to have sex” is derived from the same root as “to arrest”; “virgin” is synonymous with “daughter.”  Though Georgians are Christians, their Islamic neighbors have trekked through the land long enough to leave their mark. Men walk with their arms slung around their girlfriends’ necks in loose yokes, and god save the city boy who introduces his girlfriend to village relatives as anything other than his wife. The prostitute does well here, offering not what women won’t do, but what their husbands don’t want them to. “She kisses my child with that mouth,” says the traditional Georgian man.

Which is why there’s often something uneasy about the union of a Georgian man and his foreign woman. You wonder who is cutting corners, and how. Does the westernized Georgian man find dating a foreigner a relief from the rules of traditional Georgian courtship, as he says? Does the foreign woman find in herself a troubling and previously unknown desire to be subsumed? My own Georgian ex loved me so furiously and bought me gifts of such lavish design that he occasionally bankrupted himself, leading me to pay the phone and electricity bills. When we were breaking up, he said that no one would ever love me as much again—a typical closing remark at the end of an affair. But looking back, I realize he may have been right.