Irakli Abashidze

Irakli Wissarionowitsch Abashidze ( Georgian ირაკლი აბაშიძე; born November 23, 1909 in Choni , Kutaisi Governorate , Russian Empire ; † January 14, 1992 in Tbilisi ) was a Georgian - Soviet poet and politician.

Life

Born in Imereti , Irakli Abashidze graduated from the State University of Tbilisi in 1931 . He then worked as an editor and took part in 1934 together with the Georgian poet Paolo Iaschwili (1892-1937) at the first congress of the Soviet Writers' Union in Moscow . Because he had written a poem of praise for Lavrenti Beria , he was briefly put in a prison camp ( gulag ) during the Great Terror under Stalin . In 1939 he became a member of the CPSU . During the Second World War he wrote propagandistic-patriotic poems. In 1953, with Stalin's approval, shortly before his death, he became chairman of the Georgian Writers' Union and held this office until 1967. In 1960 he also became vice-president of the Georgian Academy of Sciences .

When the Russian author Boris Leonidowitsch Pasternak , author of the novel Doctor Schiwago , was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 , Abashidze took part in the smear campaign against Pasternak and demanded his expulsion from the Soviet Union. He also joined the attacks by the USSR communist leadership on the United States and Britain when the US intervened in Lebanon in 1958 . As a confidante of Khrushchev and Brezhnev , he often conferred with these heads of government. The reform policy pursued by President Gorbachev since the late 1980s nonetheless met with Abashid's approval. He then initially supported Zviad Gamsakhurdia when he was elected President of Georgia in 1991. But when the resistance against the increasingly authoritarian president grew, Abashidze switched sides. He died in Tbilisi in early 1992 at the age of 82. The putschists who were successful against Gamsachurdia had him buried in a state funeral.

plant

Active in literature since 1928, Abashidze wrote patriotic poems that were oriented towards socialist realism . His early works dealt with the revolutionary past of the Georgians and the establishment of the new Soviet life. He often addressed heroism in his poetry. He went on an excursion to India and organized an expedition to Jerusalem in 1959/60 , because according to some researchers the remains of Shota Rustaveli should be in the Georgian monastery there. At that time he wrote the cycle of poems On the Traces of Rustavelis (German 1977), which revolves around the legendary figure of this great Georgian poet and comprises two parts (again consisting of individual poems): C'xel indoet'ši ( In hot India ) and Palestina, Palestine ( Palestine, Palestine ). Since 1963, Abashidze headed his own commission, which dealt with the restoration of Rustaveli's works. In 1966 he became editor-in-chief of the Georgian-Soviet encyclopedia. He was the holder of two orders of Lenin and also emerged as a literary critic and translator; He has translated works by the Russian poets Alexander Sergejewitsch Pushkin and Vladimir Wladimirowitsch Mayakowski and the Bulgarian writer Ivan Wasow into Georgian.

literature

• Abašije, Irakli , in: Lexikon der Weltliteratur , 4th edition, 2nd volume (2004), p. 3.

Remarks

1. ↑ Abašije, Irakli , in: Lexikon der Weltliteratur , 4th edition, 2nd volume (2004), p. 3.
2. ^ Artschil Chotiwari: Irakli Abaschidze . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . 3rd edition, Vol. 1 (2009), pp. 16f.