ABSTRACT
The younger generation associated with the dispossessed royal family were more open to new ideas, in particular to Romanticism, its egalitarianism and its pathetic fallacy. The prototype Georgian Romantic Aleksandre Chavchavadze (ალექსანდრე ჭავჭავაძე1786–1846) was the son of Garsevan Chavchavadze. Garsevan had, as Erekle II’s ambassador to Moscow, negotiated the 1783 treaty which many Bagrations held to be treachery. (Giorgi Avalishvili was Aleksandre Chavchavadze’s uncle, which also linked him to the Bagration circles.) Aleksandre’s early education was Russian: he did not see Georgia until he was 13. There his career began as a political fighter: aged 18, he joined Prince Parnaoz in the first rebellion in the mountains of Mtiuletia against Russian hegemony, a hopeless attempt at restoring the Georgian throne. Prison made him a poet: he translated an anonymous Russian essay, a pastiche of Rousseau’s De l’inégalité as Man Who is Now Oppressed (ახლოთი განჩხრეკილი კაცი), inappropriately dedicated it to the pretender Parnaoz, and then wrote the first radical civic poem in Georgian, a mukhambazi beginning ‘Woe to this world and its tenants’ (ვაჰ, სოფელსა ამას და მისთა მდგმურია). The fifth line of each stanza denounces those who live ‘by oppressing the humble, by extortion and accumulation’. The poem became deservedly popular: at the age of 18 Aleksandre Chavchavadze’s manuscripts were already circulating, and his lyrics, songs of love or protest, in the spirit of Besiki or of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were soon to be sung to the sound of the pianofortes and harpsichords now being imported to Tbilisi. Davit Rektori, whose seminary the Russians had closed, expressed his amazement: Nobody like you has been born in Iverian lands, I envy the wisdom your parents gave you, Broad understanding, humble intuition, sun-like knowledge, Beholding you, I can’t find praise that is ornate enough.
