ABSTRACT
Striving to inform and entertain, as well as to edify, Leonti Mroveli as chronicler shifted the balance of Georgian literature from the spiritual to the temporal. An even greater shift towards a Renaissance idea of literature was prepared by a semi-hagiography, semi-romance, the Balahvariani (ბალაჰვარიანი, or ‘The Tale of Balahvar and lodasap’). In Europe the work is known as The Tale of Varlaam and Io[da]saphat, and by the thirteenth century almost every literature from Icelandic to Russian had a version, derived from a Greek text from around the eleventh century. The author of the Greek text has been called Byzantine literature’s main candidate for the Nobel prize, and the ‘monk John’ mentioned in some manuscripts has been assumed to be John Damascene, who is the only poetic genius of the time and region known to be capable of such narrative power, poetic imagination, and ascetic conviction (not to mention a knowledge of Syriac and Arabic) as the tale possesses.
