Vazha Pshavela

(pseudonym of Luka Pavlovich Razikashvili). Born July 14 (26), 1861, in the village of Chargali, Dushetskii District; died June 27 (July 10), 1915, in Tbilisi. Georgian writer.

Vazha Pshavela was born into the family of a priest. He studied at the Telavi church school and the Gori teachers’ seminary, where be became acquainted with Georgian Narodniks (populists). After graduating from the seminary in 1882, he became a village schoolteacher; he defended the peasants from oppression. He enrolled in the department of law at St. Petersburg University as an auditor in 1883, but he returned home in 1884 because of material need. He tilled the land, kept a herd, and hunted. He began to write in the mid-1880’s.

In his works Vazha Pshavela depicted the way of life and psychology of the contemporary Pshavy. He was the author of 36 narrative poems, about 400 other poems, plays, stories, and ethnological, publicistic, and critical articles. He gave virtually precise ethnological descriptions of the lives of mountaineers; at the same time, he recreated a whole world of mythological concepts. The poet looked to the heroic past of his people and summoned them to the struggle against their external and internal enemies (the poem The Wounded Snow Leopard, 1890; Letter of a Pshav Soldier to His Mother, 1915, and others).

In his best epic works Pshavela raised the problems of the interrelations of man and society and man and nature and resolved the problems of love and duty to the people. The narrative poems Aluda Ketelauri (1888; Russian translation, 1939) and The Guest and the Host (1893; Russian translation, 1935) depict the conflict between the individual and the temi (the peasant commune): the heroes oppose certain obsolete laws of the peasant commune. These people of strong spirit and their sense of their own worth and thirst for freedom are dear to the poet. He touches upon these themes in the play The Outcast (1894). Vazha Pshavela idealized the old customs of the Pshavy, their purity, and their freedom from the taint of “false civilization.” In the narrative poem Snake Eater (1901; Russian translation, 1934) the sage Min-diia dies because he cannot reconcile his ideals with the demands of his family and society. The narrative poem Bakhtrioni (1892; Russian translation, 1943) tells of the participation of the Georgian tribes in the uprising against the Iranian conquerors in Kakheti (Eastern Georgia) in 1659.

As a poet who sang of the natural setting of his native land, Vazha Pshavela has no equal in Georgian poetry. His landscape is full of movement and internal conflicts. His language is saturated with the richness of folk speech; at the same time, it is an irreproachably precise literary language. Vazha Pshavela’s popularity grew during the Soviet period. Through superb Russian translations (by N. Zabolotskii, V. Derzhavin, B. Pasternak, S. Spas skii, and others) his works became the property of all the peoples of the USSR. His poems and stories have been translated into many foreign languages. By a resolution of the World Peace Council, the 100th anniversary of Vazha Pshavela’s birth was observed by all progressive people (1961).