Iosif Grishashvili

(pseudonym of I. G. Mamulaishvili). Born Apr. 12 (24), 1889, in Tbilisi; died there Aug. 3, 1965. Georgian Soviet poet and literary critic. People’s Poet of the Georgian SSR (1959). Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR (1946). Born into the family of a mason.

Grishashvili published his first work in 1904. In his first collections of poems, A Bouquet of Roses and Fantasy (1906–07), he showed his appreciation of modernism. He also published collections in 1911 and 1914. Lyrical love poems and other intimate subjects dominated his prerevolutionary work, although several poems were full of enthusiasm for the revolutionary struggle.

After the establishment of Soviet power in Georgia in 1921, social and civil motifs became more prominent in Grishashvili’s poetry. He became the voice of reborn Georgia and social transformation and of the hero of the new age (“To the Fatherland” [1938], “Light,” “The Reward,” “Here Comes the Georgian Automobile,” “Hymn to Labor,” “New Kutaisi,” “Narindzhiano,” “One Day in the Country,” and “Samgori”). In “Farewell to Old Tbilisi” (1925), “New Tbilisi,” and “Grigorii Orbeliani on Komsomol Avenue,” he exalted the image of a new city.

During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Grishashvili wrote excellent poems, such as “Fatherland and Victory” (1941), “To Leningrad,” “To the Heroes of Stalingrad” (1943), “The Spring of Victory,” and “Ballad of the White Handkerchief.” His one-volume collection of poems (1949) earned him the USSR State Prize in 1950.

Grishashvili was the author of studies in the history of Georgian literature and theater, including Saiat-Nova, TheLiterary Bohemia of Old Tbilisi, The Life of Aleksandr Chavchavadze, Il’ia Chavchavadze and the Georgian Theater, and Aleksandr Kazbegi as Actor, and on Russo-Georgian, Georgian-Ukrainian, and Georgian-Armenian literary connections. He also wrote for children and youth. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.