ABSTRACT
King Archil followed Teimuraz I’s example and developed his poetics to link personal and national tragedy and the metres of Rustaveli and Chakhrukhadze with conceits, forms, and themes inspired by Persia. King of Imeretia from 1664 to 1675 and for a few months at a time in the 1690s, Archil was born in 1647 and died at the Georgian exiles’ village of Vsesviatskoe, then near Moscow, 1 in 1712. His last thirteen years of exile in Russia were devoted to setting up Georgian printing-presses — the first book printed was the Psalms in 1703; he worked on the Georgian Bible that was to be printed in 1743, compiled chronicles, translated Russian and Greek texts, and, through his association with Peter the Great, made tentative contacts with European scholars. He versified earlier prose texts — for example, the Visramiani — in Rustavelian metre, wrote didactic poems, such as Dispute between Man and the World (გაბაასება კაცისა და სოფლისა, 1684) and Georgia’s Morality (საქართველოს ზნეობანი 1684), as well as a few eulogies and a very few lyrics. The philosophical Dispute between Man and the World was inspired by four bitter lines written in Astrakhan by a certain Davit Japaridze (დავით ჯაფარიძე dates unknown):
They said: ‘The grinding wheel of the world’s treachery is eternally turning, It gives us delight, we have trouble equally, now help, now grief. Let no one pursue it, no-one can reach it, whether you have horse or boat.’ It is said that nobody will remain to the end without resentment.
