ABSTRACT
A mason's son, his roots were among the shopkeepers and tradesmen of old Tbilisi: he worked first as a theatre prompter, then as a compositor. While he translated from Armenian and Azeri Turkish (and even learnt French), he boasted that he knew no Russian. He was thus a purely 'native' ashugh, in contrast to the eighteenth-century polyglot Armenian Sayat-Nova, whose biography he wrote and emulated. Grishashvili's lyrics intentionally followed the tradition of the folk qarachoghlebi (l:J'~P1'~~(TJc::c::::aoo, 'black-tunics', Tbilisi's young burghers renowned for their cavalier hedonism) and kinto (JoD8(T), the roguish street pedlars and market traders).
