He was born in 1786, in St Petersburg, Russia, where his father, Prince Garsevan Chavchavadze, served as an ambassador of Heraclius II, king of Kartli and Kakheti in eastern Georgia.

At the age of 18, Alexander Chavchavadze joined Prince Parnaoz, a member of the dispossessed royal family, in the 1804 rebellion in the mountainous Georgian province of Mtiuleti against Russian rule.

Following the suppression of the uprising, he was briefly put in prison where he composed his first literary works, including a radical poem written in Georgian, Woe to This World and Its Tenants (ვაჰ, სოფელსა ამას და მისთა მდგმურთა).

His manuscripts were widely circulated with his lyrics of love or protest, written in the spirit of the 18th-century Georgian poet Besiki or of the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sung in Tiflis and elsewhere in Georgia.

During the War of the Sixth Coalition (1813-4) against Napoleon I of France, he served as an aide-de-camp to the Russian commander Barclay de Tolly and was wounded in his leg at the Battle of Paris on 31 March 1814.

Open to new ideas, in particular to the early French Romanticism, he was impressed by Lamartine and Victor Hugo, as well as Racine and Corneille, whose writing entered Georgian literature through Chavchavadze.

At the same time, he was regarded as Georgia's most refined, educated and wealthy 19th-century aristocrat, fluent in several European and Asiatic languages and with extensive and friendly ties with the cream of Georgian and Russian society who frequented his famous salon in Tiflis.

Another daughter, Catherine, married David Dadiani, prince of Mingrelia, and inspired in Nicholas Baratashvili the hopeless love that made him the greatest poet of Georgian Romanticism.

At his Italianate summer mansion in Tsinandali, Kakheti, he frequently entertained foreign guests with music, wit, and – most especially – the fine vintages made at his estate winery (marani).

In 1846, Alexander Chavchavadze fell victim to an accident,[1] under somewhat mysterious circumstances: while returning to his palace in Tsinandali at night, somebody from the nearby woods approached him and splashed hot water while he was galloping on his horse.

Prior to that event, his poetry was mostly impregnated with laments for the former grandeur of Georgia, the loss of national independence and his personal grievances connected with it; his native country under the Russian empire seemed to him a prison, and he pictured its present state in extremely gloomy colors.

In his letters, Alexander heavily criticized Russian treatment of Georgian national culture and even compared it with the pillaging by Ottomans and Persians who had invaded Georgia in the past.

Some of the most original of his late poems are, Oh, my dream, why have you appealed to me again (ეჰა, ჩემო ოცნებავ, კვლავ რად წარმომედგინე), and The Ploughman (გუთნის დედა) written in the 1840s.