Ivane Javakhishvili - Biography

Biography

Prince Ivane Javakhishvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia (then part of Imperial Russia) to the aristocratic family of Prince Alexander Javakhishvili, who served as an educator at the Tbilisi Gymnasium. Having graduated from the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the St. Petersburg University in 1899, he became a privat-docent of the Chair of Armenian and Georgian Philology at his alma mater. From 1901 to 1902, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Berlin. In 1902, he accompanied his mentor, Academician Niko Marr, to Mount Sinai where they studied medieval Georgian manuscripts. After the first volumes of Javakhishvili's monumental, but yet unfinished, kartveli eris istoria (A History of the Georgian Nation) appeared between 1908 and 1914, the young scholar quickly established himself as a preeminent authority on Georgian and Caucasian history, Georgian law, paleography, diplomacy, music, drama and other subjects, producing landmark studies in these fields.

Early in 1918, he was instrumental in founding Georgia's first regular university in Tbilisi, thus realizing a long-time dream cherished by generations of Georgian intellectuals but consistently frustrated by the Imperial Russian authorities. The Tbilisi University (present-day I. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, TSU, which now bears his name), of which Javakhishvili became a professor and the head of the Department of the History of Georgia, rapidly assumed a dominant position in Georgia's educational life. In 1919, Javakhishvili succeeded the noted chemist Petre Melikishvili as the second rector of the university: he served until June 1926, when, in the aftermath of anti-Soviet August Uprising of 1924, tolerance of non-Marxist intellectuals began to contract. Although he was permitted to publish and teach, this eclipse probably saved his life, since his successor at the university, was among the victims of the Stalinist Great Purge of 1936-7. He was forced to step down at TSU in 1938, but was soon appointed director of the Department of History at the State Museum of Georgia which he headed until his death in Tbilisi in 1940. He was interred at the yard of the TSU.