Aleksandre Manvelishvili and His Contributions to Rustvelology

Abstract

Aleksandre Manvelishvili, a Georgian historian, educator, and journalist, be­longed to the generation of emigrants forced to leave Georgia in the late 1920s as a result of political upheaval. In 1930, like many of his compatriots, he emigrated on the French ship Angkor and settled in Paris, where he soon became active in poli­tical, journalistic, and academic life, focusing on Georgian history and literature.

This article examines one aspect of Manvelishvili's intellectual legacy – his contribution to Rustvelology, the scholarly study of Shota Rustaveli's work and his magnum opus, The Knight in the Panther's Skin. Manvelishvili's interest in Rustaveli developed in the 1930s, shortly after his arrival in Paris, where he established close intellectual ties with leading figures of the first wave of Georgian emigration, inclu­ding Assyriologist Mikheil Tsereteli, lawyer and literary scholar Zurab Avalishvili, and literary critic Shalva Beridze.

Manvelishvili's first scholarly work in this field was The Knight in the Pan­ther's Skin and Rustaveli's Ethical Ideology (Istanbul, 1933), published with the support of Shalva Vardidze. This study represents a critical response to Zurab Ava­lishvili's monograph, "Questions on 'The Knight in the Panther's Skin'" (Paris, 1931), which elicited mixed and often polemical responses in the Georgian émigré press. Manvelishvili's consistent attention to Avalishvili's work is confirmed by his pre­viously published bibliographical review of the first three chapters of this work – "The Verse on the Seven Luminaries," "Shota the Manichean," and "The Serpent and the Moon" – published in issues 43-44 of the émigré newspaper Tetri Giorgi. The fourth chapter, "Love," which he considered particularly problematic, became the subject of a separate, more extensive critical study.

Although the voluminous work (88 pages), as the title suggests, is devoted to the moral and ethical aspects of Rustaveli's poem, Manvelishvili's entire argument is essentially constructed as a critical engagement with Avalishvili's interpretations. His analyses and conclusions are formed in direct, often polemical, dialogue with Avali­sh­vili's scholarly positions.

Manvelishvili's interest in Rustaveli continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as evidenced by his numerous publications in émigré periodicals such as Mo­ma­vali and Kavkasioni. He possessed a profound knowledge of both the Georgian and foreign Rustavel studies traditions and published critical articles on the works of scholars such as Pavle Ingorokva and Viktor Nozadze.

Even after moving to the United States, Manvelishvili continued his research on Rustvelology and published in the journal Kavkasioni. At the end of his life, at the age of 90, he completed a seminal work, approximately 400 pages long, on ancient Georgian literature (San Francisco, 1989), dedicating its ninth chapter to the poem "The Knight in the Panther's Skin."