ABSTRACT
The transition to the twentieth century was not simply chronological, nor was it ideological. If we take 1905 as the year when the Russian empire entered the twentieth century, then the same phenomena affect Georgia as Russia — most writers joined one of two camps. One camp, of Realist, populist prose-writers, believed literature to be a tool for revolution; the other camp, of cosmopolitan ‘Symbolist’ verse-writers, believed in Art for Art’s Sake, a slogan which, in Georgia, was perhaps more shocking than any other radical view, and was more shocking than in any other Christian culture. But a third factor which marked the entry into a new era is peculiar to Georgia: the poetry of Vazha-Pshavela and the flood of folk verse from which Vazha’s own work stems and to which he led his readers. Both Vazha’s work and the newly discovered folk verse deeply influenced everything that followed.
