ABSTRACT
No century since the thirteenth in Georgian literature suffered such abrupt peripeteias as the twentieth century. The violent events of 1905 which had spawned such extraordinary phenomena as the brief-lived revolutionary Gurian ‘Republic’ created an independent literature, in which first naturalistic prose then Symbolist poetry became confident enough to break free of its foreign models. With the maturity of Vazha-Pshavela, feelings of cultural inferiority to Russia and western Europe lessened.
