ABSTRACT
Not all the last Bagrations' efforts were the work of a spent force. The royal princes were often accompanied by their tutors into exile: the most extraordinary of these figures, a survival of the heroic past, was Petre Laradze (,)~hI)P'JO c.:::.~P'J.)dO' 1770s-1837), tutor, saviour, librarian, and inspiration to Teimuraz Bagrationi (son of Giorgi XII). Petre Laradze was a figure of the past, in that he persisted with the composition of chivalrous and fantastic verse-romance as if a century of enlightenment had never happened. At the same time, he is the typical figure of the
early Romantic era, the forger, mystifier, or pasticheur who, like Chatterton in England, Macpherson in Scotland, and in Russia perhaps the author of The Lay of Igor's Host, invents the medieval literature that can no longer be recovered. Petre Laradze's greatest work is the Dilariani (,!?oc::,:,)ct,o')6o, The Story of Dilar'). The Dilariani is one of several extant or lost works attributed to the spectral Sargis Tmogvcli (h.')P1(~ou (Jla(T)(~33~o, c.12(0). Laradze was the youngest son of a heroic priest-general and was 'bequeathed' to the royal family by his father, and thus followed Teimuraz to Persia for seven years. He retrieved Teimuraz with enormous difficulty, but as they were expelled by the Russians from Tbilisi to Peterhof, Laradze was suspected of treachery by Teimuraz, and took refuge between 1811 and 1825 in composing 20,000 lines in three volumes of poetry, of which Dilariani is by far the most curious. It is closest in genre to the versified Amirandarejaniani, but there are clements from almost every Georgian romance from the twelfth to the seventeenth century: while out hunting, King Dilar sees a strange youth holding a portrait of a woman. After many quests and battles with sorcerers, the heroes return to triumph at a mass wedding of 10,000 warriors and maidens. The work was posthumously published by Laradze's younger brother, but has lain forgotten ever since. The royal princes were already freeing themselves from their past and trying to deal with present predicaments.
