ABSTRACT
Around 1910 critics identified Sandro Shanshiashvili (სანდრო შანშიაშვილი, 1888–1979) as the most promising and the most Europeanized Georgian poet, even in the hotbed of modernism, the Kutaisi Realschule. He had real reading to back the sophisticated pose of the Kutaisi decadent, and stood aside from the younger Blue Horns. Shanshiashvili was soon noted for his dramas in verse and prose. In 1908 revolutionary fervour landed him in prison: he began writing long poems based on Greek and Semitic legends of Colchis, as well as a conventionally titled book of lyrics, The Garden of Sadness (სევდის ბაღი, 1909), which married Besiki to Verlaine. Travels to Berlin, Zurich (1911–12), and Leipzig (1914) brought the influence of Symbolist narrative poetry, and gave him the Germanic and modernist education that shaped the careers of Robakidze and Gamsakhurdia. During the First World War he edited the newspaper Sakartvelo and the magazine Merani. Better than any other Georgian poet he matched a Symbolist rejection of the world to fervent revolutionary positivism, the secret of his longevity. He showed sensitivity and a gift for dramatic verse in his translation of Edmond Rostand’s La Princesse lointaine (შვიდი მნათობი, 1, 1919). The motif of ‘the distant princess’ had long saturated Shanshiashvili’s own poetry — for example, ‘Where Does the Horseman Rush to?’ (სად მიჰქრის მხედარი?, 1905): 1 There sits the bride Zenari by the castle window, She watches the surrounding area, she weeps bitterly: Why is she in thrall to melancholy, what sadness afflicts her? They have abducted her lover, he is a prisoner.
