In the words of the modern British scholar of Russian and Georgian literature, Donald Rayfield, "his vivid story-telling, straight in medias res, his buoyant humour, subtle irony, and moral courage merit comparison with those of Stendhal, Guy de Maupassant, and Émile Zola.

He enrolled into the Yalta College of Horticulture and Viticulture, but a family tragedy forced him to abandon his studies: robbers killed his mother and sister, and his father died shortly thereafter.

After the extensive travels to Switzerland, Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, the United States, Germany and Turkey from 1908 to 1909, he clandestinely returned to his homeland only to be arrested and exiled from Georgia in 1910.

In 1923, during the Bolshevik crackdown on the party, Javakhishvili was arrested and sentenced to death, but was exonerated through the mediation of the Georgian Union of Writers and released after six months of imprisonment.

In his best writings, the novelist combines the devastating realism and characteristic humorous touches with underlying pessimism and anarchy to contrast country and city life, tsarist and Soviet times.

Another major work, the satirical Kvachi Kvachantiradze (კვაჭი კვაჭანტირაძე; 1924), was dramatized in 1927 for Sandro Akhmeteli's Rustaveli Theatre, but the project was aborted when the leading pro-Bolshevik critics denounced it as pornography (the play has since been lost).

In his 1926 novel The White Collar (თეთრი საყელო), Javakhishvili describes the fate of the freedom-loving and stoical Georgian mountaineers – Khevsurs – in the new Soviet reality.

Although welcomed and befriended by the local mountainous community, Elizbar, longing to return to the city's life (symbolized in the story by The White Collar), brings Khatuna to Tbilisi and abandons his highlander friends and in-laws in the face of a forthcoming disaster preceded by the Khevsur armed resistance to the Soviets.

Although the story of an outlaw fighting against the gentry was considered "ideologically correct", the "left" critics were suspicious of Javakhishvili's recognizable parallels between Imperial Russia and the Soviet state.

He survived only because of the "kind mood" of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who was personally asked by Javakhishvili's close friends historian Pavle Ingorokva and physician Nikoloz Kipshidze.

That was a story of a revolutionary but bourgeoisie woman, Ketevan, whose lover, a Bolshevik underground worker Zurab, persuades her to marry a Tsarist gendarme officer, Avsharov, whom she is to kill.

A small part of his legacy is preserved in the Mikhail Javakhishvili house museum in central Tbilisi, where the writer used to live, in an apartment that is also inhabited by descendants of the family.