Vazha-Pshavela - Life

Life

Vazha-Pshavela was born in a small village Chargali (Pshavi mountainous province in Eastern Georgia) in a family of clergyman. He graduated from the Pedagogical Seminary in Gori 1882, where he became close to Georgian populists (narodniki). Then 1883 entered Law Department of St. Petersburg University (Russia) as a non-credit student, but returned to Georgia in 1884 due to financial restraints. Worked as a teacher of Georgian language. He was also a famous representative of a National-Liberation movement of Georgia.

Vazha-Pshavela started his literature activities in mid-1880s. In his works, he portrayed everyday life and psychology of his contemporary Pshavs. Vazha-Pshavela is the author of many world-class literary works - 36 epics, about 400 poems ("Aluda Ketelauri", "Bakhtrioni", "Gogotur and Apshina", "Host and Guest", "Snake eater", "Eteri", "Mindia", etc.), plays, and stories, as well as ethnographic, journalistic, and critic articles. He pictured the highlanders' life almost exactly ethnographically and still recreated an entire world of mythological concepts. In his poetry, the poet addressed the heroic past of his people and appealed to the struggle against external and internal enemies (poems A Wounded Snow Leopard (1890), A Letter of a Pshav Soldier to His Mother (1915), etc.).

In his best epic compositions, Vazha-Pshavela exposed the problems of interaction between an individual and a society, a human and nature, love and duty before the nation. A conflict between an individual and a temi (community) is depicted in epics Aluda Ketelauri (1888, Russian translation, 1939) and Guest and Host (1893, Russian translation 1935); its characters choose against some obsolete laws of their community.

The poet's preferences are strong-willed people, their dignity, and zeal for freedom. The same themes are touched in the play The Rejected One (1894). Vazha-Pshavela idealized the Pshavs' old rituals, their purity, and non-degeneracy with the "false civilization". The wise man Mindia in the epic Snake-Eater (1901, Russian translation 1934) dies because he cannot reconcile his ideals with the needs of his family and society. The epic Bakhtrioni (1892, Russian translation 1943) narrates on participation of the Georgian highlander tribes in the uprising of Kakheti (East Georgia) against the Iranian subjugators in 1659.

As a nature admirer, Vazha-Pshavela knows no comparison in Georgian poetry. His landscapes are full of motion and internal conflicts. The language is saturated with all the riches of his native language, and yet this is an impeccably exact literary language. Thanks to excellent translations into Russian (by Nikolay Zabolotsky, V. Derzhavin, Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak, S. Spassky, Marina Tsvetaeva, and others), translations into English (by Donald Rayfield, Venera Urushadze, Lela Jgerenaia, Nino Ramishvili, and others), translations into French (by Gaston Bouatchidzé), translations into German (by Yolanda Marchev, Steffi Chotiwari-Jünger).

Vazha-Pshavela's compositions have became available to representatives of other nationalities of the ex-USSR.

Vazha-Pshavela died in Tiflis on July 10, 1915. Buried in the same place, in the Pantheon of the Mtatsminda Mountain. He was a representative of a National-Liberation movement of Georgia.

Poems and narrative stories of Vazha-Pshavela are published in more than 20 languages.

The mountaineer poet Vazha-Pshavela is indeed, as Donald Rayfield writes,‘qualitatively of a greater magnitude than any other Georgian writer’.

The five epic poems of Vazha-Pshavela ('Aluda Ketelauri' (1888), 'Bakhtrioni' (1892), 'Host and Guest' (1893), 'The avenger of the blood' (1897), 'Snake eater' (1901)) is based on the principle Golden ratio, thus this poems resembles the works of Ancient and Renaissance authors.

In 1961, a museum and memorial was built in Chargali to honor Vazha-Pshavela.