11 Facts About Nikoloz Baratashvili

Prince Nikoloz "Tato" Baratashvili was a Georgian poet.

Nikoloz Baratashvili was one of the first Georgians to marry modern nationalism with European Romanticism and to introduce "Europeanism" into Georgian literature.

Nikoloz Baratashvili, affectionately known as Tato, was born in Tiflis, Georgia's capital, which was then a principal city of Russian Transcaucasia.

Nikoloz Baratashvili's father, Prince Meliton Baratashvili, was an impoverished nobleman working for the Russian administration.

Nikoloz Baratashvili's mother, Ephemia Orbeliani, was a sister of the Georgian poet and general Prince Grigol Orbeliani and a scion of the penultimate Georgian king Erekle II.

Nikoloz Baratashvili graduated, in 1835, from a Tiflis gymnasium for nobility, where he was tutored by Solomon Dodashvili, a Georgian patriot and liberal philosopher.

The tragic quality of Nikoloz Baratashvili's poetry was determined by his traumatic personal life as well as the contemporary political situation in his homeland.

The failure of the 1832 anti-Russian conspiracy of Georgian nobles, with which Nikoloz Baratashvili was a schoolboy sympathizer, forced many conspirators to see the independent past as irremediably lost and to reconcile themselves with the Russian autocracy, transforming their laments for the lost past and the fall of the native dynasty into Romanticist poetry.

Nikoloz Baratashvili died of malaria in Ganja, unmourned and unpublished, at the age of 27.

Nikoloz Baratashvili's influence was long delayed, but as the next generation of Georgian literati rediscovered his lyrics, he was posthumously published, between 1861 and 1876, and idolized.

Nikoloz Baratashvili's love-poetry reached its acme with his unhappy obsessive love for Princess Chavchavadze and is impregnated with an idea of the orphaned soul as in The Orphaned Soul.