Brief review:
The Literature of Georgia - A History
Donald Rayfield
Clarendon Press
Oxford
1994
360 pages.
This is a hardback history of Georgian literature from its origins. As I haven't actually read it, my comments are limited to saying what it contains. I only managed to borrow it yesterday from the library.
It is divided into two sections. The first 62 pages are of more interest to the specialist that the lay reader, and deal with the early texts that are mostly religious ones.
But the chapter from pages 73-86 deals with the first major work of Georgian literature, Shota Rustaveli's epic poem
The Knight in the Panther Skin from around the beginning of the 13th century. Then page 122 onwards moves through the 18th century to the poets of the 19th century.Then the Romantic Poets, then the birth of modern literature from page 162 onwards. Personally, that's when it begins interesting for me.
Georgian literature kept having to start all over again, as the history of Georgia is a troubled one, as we have seen yet again this past week. Rayfield follows literature up to about 1940-1950s in detail, with some things tacked on the end describing decades after that.
One of the worst epochs for Georgian literature was when the notorious Lavrenty Beria (see Wiki article at:
Lavrentiy Beria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) was in power. Beria was born near Sukhumi in Abkhazia and is nearly as notorious as Stalin for his mass murder. During the Stalinist purges of the 1930s controlled literature and several Georgian writers were arrested, murdered or sent to labour camps. The Communist Party all but wiped out the Georgian literature of the period.
Luckily, there has been room for poetry and prose in Georgia. This looks to be a good introduction, if you choose the parts that interest you and skip the rest.