Konstantine Gamsakhurdia was a Georgian writer and public figure. Educated and first published in Germany, he married Western European influences to purely Georgian thematic to produce his best works, such as The Right Hand of the Grand Master and David the Builder. Hostile to the Soviet rule, he was, nevertheless, one of the few leading Georgian writers to have survived the Stalin-era repressions, including his exile to a White Sea island and several arrests. His works are noted for their character portrayals of great psychological insight. Another major feature of Gamsakhurdia's writings is a new subtlety he infused into Georgian diction, imitating an archaic language to create a sense of classicism.
Yury Bogolyubsky, known as Giorgi Rusi in the Kingdom of Georgia, was a Rus' prince of Novgorod (1172–1175). Born around 1160, He was married to Queen Tamar of Georgia from 1185 until being divorced and exiled in 1188.
Prince Nikoloz "Tato" Baratashvili was a Georgian poet. He was one of the first Georgians to marry modern nationalism with European Romanticism and to introduce "Europeanism" into Georgian literature. Due to his early death, Baratashvili left a relatively small literary heritage of fewer than forty short lyrics, one extended poem, and a few private letters, but he is nevertheless considered to be the high point of Georgian Romanticism. He was referred to as the "Georgian Byron".
Dmitry Vladimirovich Kuzmin, is a Russian poet, critic, and publisher.
David Orbeliani, monikered David "the General" was a Georgian military figure, politician, translator, and a poet of some talent.
Mzechabuk "Chabua" Amirejibi, was a Georgian novelist and Soviet-era dissident notable for his magnum opus, Data Tutashkhia, and a lengthy experience in Soviet prisons.
Paolo Iashvili was a Georgian poet and one of the leaders of Georgian symbolist movement. Under the Soviet Union, his obligatory conformism and the loss of his friends at the height of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge heavily affected Iashvili, who committed suicide at the Writers’ Union of Georgia.
Mikheil Javakhishvili was a Georgian and Soviet novelist who is regarded as one of the top twentieth-century Georgian writers. His first story appeared in 1903, but then the writer lapsed into a long pause before returning to writing in the early 1920s. His recalcitrance to the Soviet ideological pressure cost him life: he was executed during the Great Purge and his writings were banned for nearly twenty years. In the words of the modern British scholar of Russian and Georgian literature, Donald Rayfield, "his vivid story-telling, straight in medias res, his buoyant humour, subtle irony, and moral courage merit comparison with those of Stendhal, Guy de Maupassant, and Émile Zola. In modern Georgian prose only Konstantine Gamsakhurdia could aspire to the same international level."
Iakob Gogebashvili was a Georgian educator, children’s writer and journalist, considered to be the founder of the scientific pedagogy in Georgia. Through his masterly compiled children's primer, Mother Language, which in a modified form serves to this day as a text book in Georgian schools, every Georgian since 1880 has learnt to read and write in their native language.
Galaktion Tabidze, simply referred to as Galaktioni ,(November 17, 1892 – March 17, 1959), was a Georgian poet of the twentieth century whose writings profoundly influenced all subsequent generations of Georgian poets. He survived Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, which claimed the lives of many of his fellow writers, friends and relatives, but came under heavy pressure from the Soviet authorities. Those years plunged him into depression and alcoholism. He was placed in a psychiatric hospital in Tbilisi, where he committed suicide.
Prince Davit Guramishvili was a Georgian poet of pre-Romantic Georgian literature. He is known for writing Davitiani, an autobiographical book of poetry that recounts his years serving abroad in the Russian military.
Sandro Shanshiashvili was a Georgian poet and playwright.
Patrick Donald Rayfield OBE is an English academic and Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police. He is also a series editor for books about Russian writers and intelligentsia. He has translated Georgian, Russian and Uzbek poets and prose writers.
Kolau Nadiradze was a Georgian poet and the last representative of Georgian Symbolist school.
Teimuraz I (1589–1663), of the Bagrationi Dynasty, was a Georgian monarch who ruled, with intermissions, as King of Kakheti from 1605 to 1648 and also of Kartli from 1625 to 1633. The eldest son of David I and Ketevan, Teimuraz spent most of his childhood at the court of Shah of Iran, where he came to be known as Tahmuras Khan. He was made king of Kakheti following a revolt against his reigning uncle, Constantine I, in 1605. From 1614 on, he waged a five-decade long struggle against the Safavid Iranian domination of Georgia in the course of which he lost several members of his family and ended up his life as the shah's prisoner at Astarabad at the age of 74.
Giorgi Leonidze was a Georgian poet, prose writer, and literary scholar.
Ana Kalandadze was a Georgian poet and one of the most influential female figures in modern Georgian literature.
Maxim D. Shrayer is a bilingual Russian-American author, translator, and literary scholar, and a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College.
Armoured Train 14–69 is a 1927 Soviet play by Vsevolod Ivanov. Based on his 1922 novel of the same name, it was the first play that he wrote and remains his most important. In creating his adaptation, Ivanov transformed the passive protagonist of his novel into an active exponent of proletarian ideals; the play charts his journey from political indifference to Bolshevik heroism. Set in Eastern Siberia during the Civil War, it dramatises the capture of ammunition from a counter-revolutionary armoured train by a group of partisans led by a peasant farmer, Nikolai Vershinin. It is a four-act play in eight scenes that features almost 50 characters; crowd scenes form a prominent part of its episodic dramatic structure. Near the end of the play a Chinese revolutionary, Hsing Ping-wu, lies down on the railway tracks to force the armoured train to stop.
Otar Chiladze was a Georgian writer who played a prominent role in the resurrection of Georgian prose in the post-Joseph Stalin era. His novels characteristically fuse Sumerian and Hellenic mythology with the predicaments of a modern Georgian intellectual.
