Giorgi Eristavi

Founder of the new Georgian theatre

1813–1864

Giorgi Eristavi (1813-1864) was caught up in the plot of 1832 as a young man: a year in prison and four years of soldier's exile in Wilno. There he saw the European stage and the romanticism of Mickiewicz, and came back with the idea of a theatre in Georgian.

The Tiflis theatre had been silent since 1795. Eristavi put together a troupe almost single-handed, and on the first of January 1851 it came before the public. He also wrote for it: the satires The Lawsuit and The Family Settlement, which spared neither the Georgian nobility nor the Russian bureaucracy.

He founded and edited the literary journal Tsiskari, twenty-four issues of it. After the viceroy Vorontsov left in 1854 Eristavi resigned from the theatre, and in 1856 the theatre closed; the Georgian stage was born again only in 1879.