ABSTRACT
Twenty years of Shanshiashvili's lyrics are gathered in The High Road I Have Travelled ((Y>3~o~o a.'l~,), 1925): his best poems, even the shortest, either tell a story - one such is the charming 'Roe-Deer and Hunter' (d33~o ~.'l a(Y]6.'l~OM3' 1909) - or idealize a woman. By the 1920s Shanshiashvili longed for the heroic: 'I sing of chivalry to fire the timid', he said in his poem 'Genesis' (~.'lO.'l~30.'l, 1922). At last, in 1930, he achieved notoriety throughout the USSR with Anzor, his adaptation of Armoured Train 14-69 (Bp01wnoe3o 14-69), a Russian civil-war play by Vsevolod Ivanov (1895-1963). The action was transferred to Dagestan, the White Army deleted, and the Chechen hero Anzor Cherbizh became an idealized heroic tribesman. The original end, in which a Chinese revolutionary lies down on the railway line to stop the armoured train, is replaced by a lezginka danced by Zaira, whose choice of partner decides whom the train is to crush. Ivanov's bleak Siberian realities give way to a rich, legendary Caucasian world of song and dance. Sandro Akhmeteli, director of the Rustaveli Theatre, collaborated in transforming this classic of Socialist Realism into a Wagnerian spectacle, very like Robakidze's Lamara. The 'Left', including the Futurist poet Simon Chikovani, attacked Anzor for trivializing the revolution. Despite his willingness to praise Stalin as early as 1931 (,Were I to compare you to a titanic oak'), association with Akhmeteli and Robakidze was to endanger Shanshiashvili in the purges of 1937. He was accused of failing to denounce others; he even tried to speak up for the doomed Paolo Iashvili, but expiated these sins by writing a 'Song to Lavrenti Beria'. His later dramas draw factually on the catastrophes of eighteenth-century Georgia: The Heroes of Krtsanisi
(J~V.'l601wb tJ8o~:i'JO, 1942), Imeretian Nights (o8()~()mob r:;.}8()()oo, 1945). He also reverted to fantasizing the civil war (October Triumph, (TIj6(T18o~ob 8()o8o, 1944).
