13 Facts About Konstantine Gamsakhurdia

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia was a Georgian writer and public figure.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia's works are noted for their character portrayals of great psychological insight.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia spent most of the World War I years in Germany, France, and Switzerland, taking his doctorate at Berlin University in 1918.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia published his first poems and short stories early in the 1910s, influenced by German Expressionism and by French Post-Symbolist literature.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia met the 1921 Bolshevik takeover of Georgia with hostility.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia edited the Tbilisi-based literary journals and for a short time led an "academic group" of writers which placed artistic values above political correctness.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia published his writings in defiance of growing ideological pressure, and went on to lead a peaceful protest-rally on the anniversary of Georgia's forcible Sovietization in 1922.

In 1925 Konstantine Gamsakhurdia published his first and one of his most impressive novels, The Smile of Dionysus, which took him eight years to write.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia survived the Joseph Stalin-Lavrentiy Beria purges, which destroyed a large part of Georgian literary society, but resolutely refused to denounce others.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia had to pay a tribute to the Stalinist dogma, conceiving a novel on Stalin's childhood in 1939.

At the height of the Stalinist terror, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia turned to the more favored genre of historical and patriotic prose, embarking on his magnum opus, the novel The Right Hand of the Grand Master, set in the early 11th century around the legend of the building of the Cathedral of Living Pillar against a broad panorama of 11th-century Georgia.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia's major post-World War II works are The Flowering of the Vine, which deals with a Georgian village shortly before the war; and the monumental novel David the Builder, which is a tetralogy about the venerated king David the Builder who ruled Georgia from 1089 to 1125.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia wrote a biographical novel about Goethe, and literary criticism of Georgian and foreign authors.