»Svanetia« and other essays about Georgia

Tretyakov traveled to Svaneti and Georgia after China – he was already trained in describing the exotic, but he could not change the old China, while he viewed Svaneti as a country in a futuristic shift between the past and the future. He describes architecture and nature, rituals, life and structure of the home, food and the way it is prepared, he draws attention to how women dye their hair in cow urine; and does this as an ethnographer objectively and systematically. But his language, the language of a futurist poet, photographer, screenwriter, movie man, creates a sensual image, brings back materiality to the metaphors, and turns the exoticism of archaic life at the turning point into an attraction in order to remove the Caucasus from »the account of romantic poetry« and »make it a staff member of the strong earthly Soviet prose« as Tretyakov saw it.

The book presents, for the first time, the complete collection of all the author's texts about Svaneti.

The foreword was written by film critic Oksana Bulgakowa.