Ilia Chavchavadze

Chavchavadze as a 1st year gymnasium student

Ilia Chavchavadze was born in Qvareli, a village in Kvareli,[5] located in the Alazani Valley, in the Kakheti province of Georgia, which was part of the Russian Empire at that time. Ilia was a tavadi, the Georgian title of prince. It is thought that the noble Chavchavadze family came from the Pshav-Khevsureti region of Georgia, and, in 1726, King Constantine II granted the Chavchavadze family the rank of Prince in recognition of their knighthood and valor to the nation. This resulted in the family moving and settling in the Alazani Gorge in Kakheti.

Ilia was the third son of Grigol Chavchavadze and Mariam Beburishvili. Grigol, like his father and his famous ancestors, had a military background. He, along with the local militiamen protected the village from numerous Dagestani invasions. This can be seen in the architecture of the Ilia Chavchavadze museum house in Kvareli, incorporating a Medieval castle style in the two-storey castle in the yard, which was designed to protect the house during invasions.

Chavchavadze was educated at the elementary level by the deacon of the village before he moved to Tbilisi where he attended the prestigious Academy for Nobility in 1848. However, from an early age, Ilia was influenced by his parents who were highly educated in classical literature, Georgian history and poetry. From his parents, Ilia learned the inspiring stories of Georgian heroism in classical historical novels. In his autobiography, Ilia refers to his mother, Princess Mariam Chavchavadze, who knew most Georgian novels and poems by heart and encouraged her children to study them. Ilia also described the influence of the deacon's storytelling, which gave him an artistic inspiration, later applied in his novel writing.

Ilia's mother, Mariam, died on 4 May 1848, when Ilia was ten years old, and his father asked his sister, Makrine, to help bring up the children. Aunt Makrine had a significant impact on Ilia's life, because, after 1852, when Ilia's father Grigol died, she was the only remaining caretaker of the family.[5]

In 1848, after the death of Princess Chavchavadze, Ilia was sent to Tbilisi by his father to begin his secondary education.[5] Ilia attended a private school for three years before he entered the 1st Academy of Tbilisi in 1851. Soon after, Ilia's father died and Aunt Makrine looked after the family. His secondary school years were very stressful, due to his father's death. However, the Chavchavadze family suffered another devastating blow when Ilia's brother, Constantine, was killed during the Dagestani raid on Kakheti. Ilia expressed his anguish and grief in one of his first short-poems called Sorrow of a Poor Man. In addition to his personal problems, the political situation in Georgia worsened under the harsh authority of the Russian Empire, which played a destructive role to the nation and its culture.

Ilia Chavchavadze during his student years

After graduating from the academy, Ilia decided to continue his education at the University of St. Petersburg, Russia. Before leaving for St. Petersburg, Ilia composed one of his most remarkable poems, To the Mountains of Kvareli in the village of Kardanakhi on 15 April 1857, in which he expressed his lifelong admiration for the Greater Caucasus Mountains and his sorrow at leaving his homeland.

That same year, Ilia was admitted to the University of St. Petersburg. During his student years, numerous revolutions sprang up in Europe which Ilia observed with great interest. Ilia's attention focused on the events in Italy and the struggle of Giuseppe Garibaldi, whom he admired for many years. While in St.Petersburg, Ilia met Princess Catherine Chavchavadze, from whom he learned about the poetry and lyrics of the Georgian romantic Prince Nik'oloz Baratashvili. Due to the harsh climate in St Petersburg, Ilia became very ill and returned to Georgia for several months in 1859.

Ilia finally returned to Georgia after the completion of his studies in 1861. During his journey back, Ilia wrote one of his greatest masterpieces, The Traveler's Diaries, in which he outlines the importance of nation-building and provides an allegorical comparison of Mt. Kazbegi and the Tergi River in the Khevi region of Georgia.

Chavchavadze's house in Tbilisi.

Newspaper "Iveria" (Iberia) founded and edited by Chavchavadze during his political career. The newspaper focused on the national liberation movement of Georgia in the late 1800s.

Ilia's main political and social goals were based on Georgian nationalism. He urged nationwide resistance to the House of Romanov's policy of forced Russification, the revival of the Georgian language, and the cultivation of Georgian literature. Even more subversive from the State's perspective, Chavchavadze also pushed for reviving the independence of the Georgian Orthodox Church from the control of the Tsar and the Holy Synod and, most subversively, for Georgia's political independence. Both of these things had ended when Georgia had become part of the Russian Empire.

As the number of supporters for his ideas grew, so did opposition to Chavchavadze from both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and particularly from Noe Zhordania. The SD's main aims were focused on toppling the Tsarist autocracy and upon an Atheist and Marxist transformation of a still unified Russian Empire. This did not include the revival of the Georgian Church, State, language, or of a distinctly Georgian identity. Ilia was viewed as bourgeois and as an old aristocrat who failed to realize the importance of the revolutionary and Atheist future.

In addition to his works described above, he was also the founder and chairman of many public, cultural and educational organizations (Society for the Spreading of Literacy Among Georgians, "The Bank of the Nobility", "The Dramatic Society", "The Historical-Ethnographical Society of Georgia", etc.). He was also a translator of British literature. His main literary works were translated and published in French, English, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian and other languages. Between 1906 and 1907, he was a member of the State Council (Gosudarstvennaya Duma) in Russia. His eclectic interests also led him to be a member of, among others, the Caucasian Committee of the Geographical Society of Russia, the Society of Ethnography and Anthropology of Moscow University, the Society of Orientalists of Russia and the Anglo-Russian Literary Society (London).

Prince Chavchavadze briefly acted as a literary mentor to a young Joseph Stalin, who was then an Orthodox seminarian in Tbilisi. According to historian Simon Sebag Montefiore,

"The Prince was sufficiently impressed to show the teenagers work to his editors. He admired Stalin's verse, choosing five poems to publish – quite an achievement. Prince Chavchavadze called Stalin the 'young man with the burning eyes.'"[6]

The assassination of Ilia Chavchavadze remains controversial today. Although the Soviet Government later accused the Tsarist secret police, or Okhrana, of ordering the assassination, at the time, the most "widely held suspicion"[8] laid his murder at the door of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.[9][10][11] Chavchavadze had publicly and very successfully undermined the growth of both factions of the Social Democratic Labour Party.[10] Furthermore, Prince Chavchavadze's Orthodox Christian and socially conservative vision for Georgian nationalism and his enormous popularity and influence upon the Georgian people may have been additional causes. Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore suspects, while Prince Chavchavadze's assassination may have been a rare instance of cooperation between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the SDLP, that Joseph Stalin may have been at least tangentially involved in the murder of his former publisher and literary mentor. According to Montefiore,[12]

The Bolshevik position in Georgia was undermined by the assassination of the hugely popular Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, in August 1907. The Bolsheviks had attacked his patriarchal vision of Georgian culture and, it was widely believed, had decided to kill him. There is some evidence that Stalin's friends Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Filipp Makharadze organized or took part in the assassination. It may be that the SDs took no part in the murder at all. Stalin always praised Chavchavadze's poetry in his old age and there is no evidence that he ordered the hit, but he was very close to Sergo and he was certainly more than capable of separating literary merit from cruel necessity: politics always came first.