Poetry
სამშობლო ხევსურისა
Not translated into English
Rapiel Eristavi · 1881
Synopsis
A Khevsur says what he would not trade for anything: the rocks where he was born, the graves of his fathers, the snow and the hunger of the high valley. He is offered the plain and its wealth, gold, a palace; he answers that he wants none of it, and that his poor mountain is worth more than everything he is promised.
Context
The poem appeared in 1881 in the newspaper Iveria, at the same time as another of its author's best-known texts. Both filled their readers with patriotic feeling in a decade when school, Church, theatre, press and the Georgian language were under attack from Russification. The floor is given to a man of the high valleys, a region the people of the plain regarded as backward, and he keeps the last word. No translation exists, either in French or in any Western language.
Who it is for
A short poem, in Georgian, never translated; one should know that Khevsureti was regarded as the end of the Georgian world.
Prizes and reception
It was called the eleventh commandment of young Georgians, and almost all of them knew it by heart.