Mikhail Dzhavakhishvili

(pseudonym Adamashvili). Born Nov. 8 (20), 1880; died 1937. Soviet Georgian writer.

Born into a peasant family in the village of Tserakvi, in present-day Marneuli Raion. In 1901 he graduated from the Yalta School of Horticulture and Viticulture.

Dzhavakhishvili’s works were first published in 1903, and in 1906 he was tried for articles he had written against the autocracy. He fled abroad and traveled in Europe and America; in 1909 he returned to his homeland using a false passport. He published the journal Eri (Nation), for which he was convicted and exiled from the Caucasus.

In his novels Kvachi Kvachantiradze (1924), Dzhakos Khiznebi (Russian translation, The Avalanche, 1925), The White Collar (1926), and Givi Shaduri (1928), which are filled with sharp conflicts, Dzhavakhishvili showed the collapse of the old world and the difficult birth of new social relations and of a new psychology. His historical novel Arsen From Marabda (Russian translation 1933-36) tells of the peasant revolutionary movement in Georgia in the first half of the 19th century under the leadership of the national hero Arsen Odzelashvili. In his last novel, A Woman’s Fate (1936), Dzhavakhishvili depicted the revolutionary events of 1905 in Tbilisi; as an artist, he was a master of subject composition and subtle analysis of the psychology of his characters.