Konstantine Gamsakhurdia - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Born into a petite noble family in Abasha in western Georgian province of Mingrelia, then under the Imperial Russian rule, Gamsakhurdia received early education at the Kutaisi gymnasium and then studied in St. Petersburg, where he quarreled with Nicholas Marr. He spent most of the World War I years in Germany, France, and Switzerland, taking his doctorate at the Berlin University in 1918. As a Russian subject, he was briefly interned at Traunstein in Bavaria where Thomas Mann sent him chocolate. Gamsakhurdia published his first poems, and short stories early in the 1910s, influenced by German Expressionism and French Post-Symbolist literature. While in Germany, he regularly wrote for German press on Georgia and the Caucasus, and was involved in organizing a Georgian Liberation Committee. After Georgia’s declaration of independence in 1918, he became an attaché on Georgia’s embassy in Berlin, responsible for repatriation of Georgian World War I prisoners and placing Georgian students in German universities.

Gamsakhurdia met the 1921 Bolshevik takeover of Georgia with hostility. He edited the Tbilisi-based literary journals and for a short time led an “academic group” of writers which placed artistic values above political correctness. Gamsakhurdia published his writings in defiance to the growing ideological pressure and he went ahead to lead a peaceful protest rally on the anniversary of Georgia’s forcible Sovietization in 1922. In 1925, Gamsakhurdia published his first and one of the most impressive novels The Smile of Dionysus (დიონისოს ღიმილი), which took him eight years to write. It is a story of a young Georgian intellectual in Paris who is detached from his native society and remains a complete stranger in the city of his ideals. This novel, like his earlier works, was partially "Decadent", and did not please the Soviet ideologists, who suspected him of fostering discontent.