Irakli Abashidze

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Irakli Abashidze (Georgian: ირაკლი აბაშიძე) (September 10, 1909 – January 14, 1992) was a Georgian poet, literary scholar and politician.

Born in Khoni, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), he graduated from Tbilisi State University in 1931 and attended the 1st Congress of the USSR Union of Writers, 1934, when socialist realism was laid down as the cultural orthodoxy. During the Great Purge under Stalin he was briefly sent to a Gulag camp for a highly flattering poem in honor of Lavrenty Beria. On return, he became editor of several literary journals and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1939. From 1953 to 1967, he chaired the Union of Georgian Writers.

In 1960, he also became a vice-president of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. The same year, he organized an expedition to the Georgian-built Monastery of the Cross at Jerusalem where his team rediscovered a fresco of Shota Rustaveli, a medieval Georgian poet. He chaired the special academic commission for the Rustaveli studies since 1963 and became an editor-in-chief of The Georgian Soviet Encyclopedia in 1967.

His poetry was mostly patriotic, but normally loyal to Soviet ideology and conformist. He was among those Soviet literary figures who denounced Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in 1956 and joined in attacks on the United States and Great Britain when the U.S. intervened in Lebanon in 1958. He was elected to the Georgian SSR Supreme Soviet and cultivated relations with Khruschev and Brezhnev, but welcomed Gorbachev’s perestroika and supported the Soviet-era dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia when he came to power and led Georgia to the declaration of independence in 1991. Abashidze died in Tbilisi in 1992 and was afforded a state funeral.^[1]

[edit] References

• Mikaberidze, Alexander (ed., 2007), Abashidze, Irakli. Dictionary of Georgian National Biography. Accessed on September 5, 2007.