ABSTRACT
Whoever he or she was, the author of the Rusudaniani is one of the last 1 anonymous authors in Georgian. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the author as a person with a known biography and personality, whose image is recorded by painters and other witnesses, appears in Georgia. Although another century elapsed before the printing-press finally appeared in Tbilisi and established a canonical text for all to read, the authority of a known author already helped to create a literature tightly bound up with contemporary psychological and political realities. The first such author is one of Georgia’s greatest figures, King Teimuraz I. Born in 1589, he became king of Kakhetia (eastern Georgia) at 16 and kept his throne for the first third of the seventeenth century (under Persian suzerainty). He was king of Kartli too from 1634 until 1648 and died in 1663, an exile at Astarabad. His life was described in verse by King Archil of Imeretia and Kartli in the fifteenth ‘response’ of his Comparison (გაბაასება). Teimuraz’s father was the ruthless usurper King Davit I of Kakhetia, who had had poetic ambitions and had tried his hand at retranslating from the Persian the didactic romance Kilila and Damana. Teimuraz’s mother was one of the last Georgian martyrs, Queen Saint Ketevan, who also expressed her grief in elegiac verse. Teimuraz was educated in Persia under the tutelage of the horrible Shah Abbas (1587–1629). Despite the appalling suffering inflicted on the king, his family, and his country by Persian armies and by Shah Abbas, who seriously envisaged exterminating the Georgian population of Kakhetia, Teimuraz unstintingly acknowledged his debt to Persia: ‘Persian poetry instilled in me musicality.’ He had such a universal knowledge of Persian and Georgian literature, clerical and lay, that he thought himself superior to Rustaveli.
