Iraklii Vissarionovich Abashidze

Born Nov. 10 (23), 1909, in the village of Khoni, Kutaisi Province. Soviet Georgian poet. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR since 1960. Member of the CPSU since 1939. Chairman of the board of the Union of Writers of Georgia between 1953 and 1967. Editor-in-chief of the Georgian Soviet Encyclopedia since 1967. Deputy of the fourth through seventh convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Abashidze’s first work was published in 1928. His poetry is imbued with enthusiasm for the assertion of a new life, with love toward his native country, and with a vivid sense of history created by the people. These characteristics are evident in his anthologies Verses (1932) and New Verses (1938) and in the verse cycles Harvest Song, Guriia Is Blooming, The Night of the Hunters, and others. The heroic feat, a major theme in his poetry, is the subject of “Be a Hero,” “The Song of Heroes,” and other poems. His poems of the war years—“Captain Bukhaidze,” “Song of the Wounded,” “To the Memory of Leselidze,” and others—are very popular. In the verse cycle In Rustaveli’s Footsteps and in the cycle Palestine, Palestine (Rustaveli Prize, 1966), Abashidze renders the complex fate and the rich inner world of the great Georgian poet. In Abashidze’s poetry, the concrete facts of national reality receive a profoundly lyrical and romantic artistic generalization. His poetry is directed toward the people; artificial images and complicated devices are foreign to it. Abashidze’s anthology The Approach (1966) is dedicated to the exalted duty of the poet. He has been awarded two Orders of Lenin and three other orders.