Alexander Kazbegi

For the street in Tbilisi, see Alexander Kazbegi Avenue.

Aleksandre Kazbegi
Alexander Kazbegi. Photo by A. Roinashvili, 1880s.
Born	(1848-01-20)20 January 1848 Stepantsminda, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	22 December 1890(1890-12-22) (aged 42) Tiflis, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire
Resting place	Mtatsminda Pantheon, Tbilisi
Occupation	Writer, novelist, journalist
Literary movement	Romanticism, Realism

Alexander Kazbegi (Georgian: ალექსანდრე ყაზბეგი; 20 January 1848 – 22 December 1893) was a Georgian writer, best known for his 1883 novel The Patricide.

Early life

Monument of Alexander Kazbegi in Stepantsminda, Georgia.

Kazbegi was born in Stepantsminda^[1] the great grandson of Kazibek Chopikashvili, a local feudal magnate who was in charge of collecting tolls on the Georgian Military Highway. Alexander Kazbegi studied in Tbilisi, Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but on returning home, decided to become a shepherd to experience the lives of the local people. He later worked as a journalist, and then became a novelist and playwright. In his later life, he suffered from insanity. After his death in Tbilisi, his coffin was carried across the Jvari Pass to his hometown of Kazbegi (now renamed Stepantsminda), which also preserves his childhood home as a museum in his honor.

His most famous work, the novel The Patricide, is about a heroic Caucasian bandit named Koba, who, much like Robin Hood, is a defender of the poor. Koba has nothing but contempt for authority, a proclivity towards violence, and a firm belief in vengeance. Kazbegi's work was a major inspiration to Ioseb Jughashvili, later known as Joseph Stalin, who used Koba as a revolutionary pseudonym.

Museum

The World Bank is supporting restoration of the Alexander Kazbegi Museum.^[2]

References

1. "Alexander Kazbegi". TheFreeDictionary.com. Archived from the original on 2020-07-13. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
2. Restoration of Stepantsminda Museum (Kazbegi Municipality) Archived 2021-11-04 at the Wayback Machine World Bank

• The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus, translated by Rebecca Ruth Gould (Budapest: Central European University Press, CEUP Classics series, 2015). ISBN 978-6155053528
• Bullock, Allen. Hitler and Stalin:Parallel Lives. Vintage Books. 1993. ISBN 0-679-72994-1
• Rebecca Ruth Gould, “Aleksandre Qazbegi’s Mountaineer Prosaics: The Anticolonial Vernacular on Georgian-Chechen Borderlands,” Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History in the Post-Soviet Space 15.1 (2014): 361-390.
• Rosen, Roger. Georgia: A Sovereign Country of the Caucasus. Odyssey Publications: Hong Kong, 1999. ISBN 962-217-748-4