Alexander Orbeliani

The conspirators planned to invite the Russian officials in the Caucasus to a grand ball where they would be given the choice of death or surrender.

The abortive uprising and relatively mild punishment that followed forced many conspirators to see the independent past as irremediably lost and to reconcile themselves with the Russian autocracy, transforming their laments for the lost past and the fall of the native dynasty into Romanticist poetry.

Orbeliani's most coherent pieces are the allegorical poem of 1832, The Moon (მთოვარე), and a patriotic short story Immaculate Blood (უმანკო სისხლი) about three sisters, nuns, who prefer death to apostasy when the commander of invading Persian troops demands it; the latter is so impressed that he has to die with them.

He was a founding member of the editorial board of Tsiskari, which for several years was the backbone of the Georgian periodical press.

Through it Orbeliani channeled his efforts to standardize a literary language, based on revival of archaic forms.