ABSTRACT
F:0r many established writers, even in 1905 and 1917, the times had not changed: those writers (and their readers) who continued to draw on Georgia's history for improving adventure stories with some erotic and violent titillation
turned a deaf ear to revolutions, world wars, independence, and invasion, let alone to Symbolism or Futurism. Socialist Realism, when finally imposed, was to them a welcome recognition of their limited aesthetic horizons. Among such writers, the archetypical dinosaur was Vasil Barnovi (3"bo~ 0,,('1)1)(1130, 1856-1934). His family, the Barnaveli, were refugees from the Meskhi community in Turkey and were saddled with the Russian form of the name, but he was a Georgian, the son of a priest. His childhood was spent in Khevsuretia, where his father had to endure the rivalry of the pagan diakonozi, an experience which enabled Barnovi to contrast Christian ideals and pagan sensuality in his most sensational plots. He was educated in the Tbilisi seminary and then at the theological academy in Moscow, where he was taught by Russia's greatest historian, Kliuchevsky, and graduated with such distinction that at the age of 25 he was offered a Russian bishopric. Georgia and its past, however, drew him irresistibly back.
