Kvareli, Tbilisi, and the Princely Family

Ilia Chavchavadze’s origins: birth at Kvareli in Kakheti on 27 October (O.S.) / 8 November 1837 into a Georgian princely family, the early death of both parents, and the schooling in Tbilisi that carried a Kakhetian nobleman’s son toward the wider world of the empire.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Kvareli and the Family

Ilia Chavchavadze was born on 27 October (Old Style) / 8 November 1837 in the village of Kvareli, in the eastern Georgian province of Kakheti, the wine country stretching along the Alazani valley beneath the Caucasus (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, National Archives of Georgia; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, for the double-dated birth). [Disputed: some older and devotional sources give the birth year or day slightly differently, but the scholarly and archival consensus is firmly 27 October (O.S.) / 8 November 1837; this collection follows it.] He was a son of Grigol Chavchavadze and his wife Mariam (née Beburishvili), and by the standards of his province a nobleman of the middling princely sort — landed, well-connected, but not among the great magnate houses (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 2010, on Ilia’s family; Ilia Chavchavadze, National Archives of Georgia).

The Chavchavadzes held the rank of tavadi — prince — one of the higher grades of the Georgian nobility. The family’s princely dignity was traced to the early eighteenth century, a grant said to date to the reign of King Constantine (Konstantine) in recognition of service to the crown (Ilia Chavchavadze, National Archives of Georgia; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia). It is important to distinguish this princely house from its most famous earlier member: Alexander Chavchavadze (1786–1846), the Romantic poet, general in Russian service, and salon-host, of the same broad clan but a distinct and older figure — a point of frequent confusion (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the two Chavchavadzes; see the disambiguation in the collection README). Ilia’s own branch was Kakhetian and provincial; his childhood was spent among the vineyards and the fortified village of Kvareli, in a household that was Georgian in speech and Orthodox in religion, on land that had known the raids of Dagestani mountaineers within living memory (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Kakheti in the period).

Orphaned Young

Ilia’s childhood was marked early by loss. His mother, Mariam, died in 1848, when he was about ten; his father, Grigol, died a few years later (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on the deaths of his parents). The boy and his siblings were thereafter largely in the care of relatives — an aunt is named in the biographical tradition as an important early influence, one of the figures through whom the Georgian language, folk memory, and religious sensibility of the household reached him (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). Per the repository methodology, the tender domestic details that later devotional accounts draw from this period are pinned to their character as later, affectionate recollection rather than as documented fact; what is firm is the early orphaning and the upbringing among kin.

The early loss of his parents left Ilia the heir to a modest patrimony and, in the pattern of his class, destined for education first at home, then in the city, and finally in the empire. The household of his childhood gave him two things that his later work would draw on constantly: the living Georgian of the Kakhetian countryside — the peasants, the vineyards, the village world he would later render in Otar’s Widow and other prose — and the Orthodox faith and church-calendar of a traditional Georgian noble family, the ordinary piety of a land that had been Christian since St. Nina (see St. Nina of Georgia; on the faith of his upbringing, Personal Faith and the Thin Record).

Schooling in Tbilisi

From the late 1840s Ilia was sent to Tbilisi — Tiflis, as the imperial administration called it — the Georgian capital and the seat of the Russian viceroyalty of the Caucasus, for his formal education (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, National Archives of Georgia). He studied first with a private tutor and then at one of the city’s gymnasia, the classical secondary schools of the imperial system, receiving the bilingual, Russian-medium education typical of a Georgian nobleman’s son of his generation (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). Tbilisi in these years was a cosmopolitan Caucasian city — Georgian, Armenian, Russian, Persian, and Muslim by turns — and its Russian gymnasium was a door into the imperial educated world, the very world through which russification worked and through which, paradoxically, the reform generation would find the ideas with which to resist it (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; see Russification and the Georgian Predicament).

The schooling in Tbilisi accomplished two things that shaped the man. It gave Ilia the Russian language and the classical and European literary formation that would make him at home among the reformist youth of the empire; and it set him, already in his gymnasium years, to writing — the first of his verses belong to this period, and the literary vocation that would define his life was awake before he left for the capital (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). When he completed his gymnasium course in the mid-1850s, the path of an ambitious noble’s son led onward and northward — to the University of St. Petersburg, the heart of the empire and, in those very years, the ferment of the Great Reforms (see St. Petersburg and the Tergdaleulebi).

The Shape of a Beginning

Nothing in this provincial-noble beginning marked Ilia out as a future saint, and the collection does not read it backward as though it did. What it gave him was ordinary and formative: a Kakhetian Georgian childhood, the early discipline of grief, the faith and language of a traditional Orthodox household, and an imperial education that opened the world. The distinctiveness came later, in what he chose to do with these gifts — to spend a life of privilege in the service of a people’s language, faith, and self-knowledge (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019, on the making of the national leader). The Kvareli and Tbilisi years are the soil; the plant grew in St. Petersburg and, above all, back in Georgia after 1861.

See Also

References

  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Kakheti and the nobility; Tbilisi and the imperial school system.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Ilia’s family and princely rank; the death of his parents; the two Chavchavadzes; his schooling and early verse.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (Kakheti in the nineteenth century.)
  • Ilia Chavchavadze. National Archives of Georgia (archive.gov.ge). (Birth 1837 at Kvareli; the family’s princely status; schooling in Tbilisi — used for biographical dates, cross-checked against Rayfield and Suny.)
  • Ilia Chavchavadze. Wikipedia. (The double-dated birth 27 October [O.S.] / 8 November 1837; the deaths of his parents; the family’s princely grant — used to locate dates, cross-checked against the scholarly sources.)
  • Tsipuria, Bela. “Ilia Chavchavadze: Georgia’s Cultural Saint and a Saint of the Georgian Orthodox Church.” In Great Immortality, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason. Leiden: Brill, 2019. (The making of the national leader.)