1st Edition
The Prose of the Mountains Three Tales of the Caucasus
By Aleksandre Qazbegi
Copyright 2015
264 Pages
by
Central European University Press
The Prose of the Mountains contains three tales of the Caucasus by Aleksandre Qazbegi, one of the most prescient and gifted chroniclers of the Georgian encounter with colonial modernity. His stories offer an invaluable counterpoint to the predominantly Russian narratives that have hitherto shaped scholarly accounts of the nineteenth-century Caucasus. “Memoirs of a Shepherd” poignantly... Read more
List of Illustrations, Note on Transliteration, Glossary, Acknowledgments, Historical Map of Georgia and the northern Caucasus, Qazbegi: A Biographical Note, Memoirs of a Shepherd, ElisoXevisberi Gocha, Afterword: Qazbegi's Mountaineer Prosaics, Appendix: Qazbegi in Translation.
Biography
Aleksandre Qazbegi was born into aristocratic privilege. Yet, instead of enjoying the life his high birth could have afforded him, he chose a life of deliberate poverty, first in the mountains where he was born, and where he lived as a shepherd for seven years, and subsequently in Tbilisi. As he crafted a fresh literary style for a new readerly demographic, Qazbegi became Georgia’s first professional writer. He died at the age of forty-five in an insane asylum in Tbilisi.
