Educated and first published in Germany, he married Western European influences to purely Georgian thematic to produce his best works, such as The Right Hand of the Grand Master and David the Builder.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia's son, Zviad, became a notable Soviet-era dissident who was subsequently elected the first President of Georgia in 1991, but died under suspicious circumstances in the civil war in 1993.

Born into a petty noble family in Abasha in western Georgian province of Mingrelia, then under Imperial Russian rule, Gamsakhurdia received his early education at the Kutaisi gymnasium and then studied in St. Petersburg, where he quarreled with Nicholas Marr.

Early in the 1930s, he obtained Lavrentiy Beria's protection and was able to resume writing, with an attempt at "socialist" novel Stealing the Moon (მთვარის მოტაცება, 1935-6), a story of love and collectivization in Abkhazia.

Soon Gamsakhurdia was arrested for an affair with Lida Gasviani, a young charming Trotskyist director of the State Publishing House, but interrogated and released by Beria who told him ironically that sexual relations with enemies of the people were permitted.

[3] Gamsakhurdia survived the Joseph Stalin-Lavrentiy Beria purges, which destroyed a large part of Georgian literary society, but resolutely refused to denounce others.

[4] At the height of the Stalinist terror, Gamsakhurdia turned to the more favored genre of historical and patriotic prose, embarking on his magnum opus, the novel The Right Hand of the Grand Master (დიდოსტატის მარჯვენა, 1939), set in the early 11th century around the legend of the building of the Cathedral of Living Pillar against a broad panorama of 11th-century Georgia.