Reconstructing Lord Byron in Georgian Postmodernist Discourse: Literary Memory, Cultural Identity, and Freedom in Otar Chkheidze’s The Italian Diaries of Byron

This article examines the literary portrait of George Noel Gordon Byron as reconstructed in Georgian postmodernist prose, with a particular focus on Otar Chkheidze's novel The Italian Diaries of Byron.The study situates Chkheidze's interpretation within a broader intertextual dialogue that spans Georgian modernism and postmodernism, drawing on the conceptual legacy of Konstantine Gamsakhurdia's essays and their reflections on Byron's travels, temperament, and creative identity.Through close textual analysis, the article explores how Byron's Italian experience functions not merely as a biographical episode but as the structural and semantic axis of Chkheidze's novel.Italy emerges as both a symbolic space of artistic freedom and a historical locus for reflections on national and personal liberation.The Georgian postmodernist perspective reimagines Byron simultaneously as a Romantic poet, a political thinker, and a cultural mediator whose fascination with Italy mirrors broader concerns about oppression, freedom, and historical destiny.The study highlights the novel's circular architectonics, its reliance on Byron's diaries and letters as privileged sources of self-representation, and its deliberate skepticism toward external biographical interpretations.By foregrounding Byron's own voice, Chkheidze constructs a multidimensional portrait that transcends conventional historical narration and transforms the poet into a postmodern figure of existential and national inquiry.Furthermore, the article examines the dichotomous representation of power and intellect through the juxtaposition of Byron and Napoleon, revealing how the novel contrasts political domination with the liberating force of the creative mind.In this framework, Byron becomes both a literary character and a conceptual device through which Georgian postmodernism interrogates the tension between individual freedom and collective historical experience.The article concludes that The Italian Diaries of Byron functions as a complex cultural palimpsest, where Georgian literary memory, European Romanticism, and postmodern narrative strategies converge to produce a uniquely Georgian interpretation of Byron's enduring legacy.