ABSTRACT
Out S tan din g as the first great 'modern' who followed Mamuka Baratashvili's trail was Davit Guramishvili. Born in 1705 he made his eighty-seven years of life into one great cycle of autobiographical poetry,
the Davitiani, which he sent to Georgia thtough an embassy returning from the Ukraine in 1787. Davit Guramishvili's first fifty years are truly Homeric: his poetry is an old man's Iliad without Odysseus' hope or joy of coming home. As an eighteen-year-old he fought near his home in the crucial battle of Zedavela, which resulted in a defeat at the hands of Turks, Dagestani tribes, and fratricidal Georgians that crushed Vakhtang VI's hopes and condemned Georgia to seventy more years of anarchy:
Alas, to say it turns my lips bitter and sour, The army should not have stayed at Zedavela: When it first came our troops defeated the enemy with a charge, But at the end by internal treachery they lost. Woe is that day! The Ottomans shed much innocent blood, Wherever they met a workman or a simple peasant, they cut off their heads; The basket needs a head, they said, they threw them into many wickerwork
carts, The bodies had no burial, foxes and wild goats gnawed at them.
