Sandro Shanshiashvili

He then began writing long poems based on Greek legends of Colchis and composed his conventionally titled book of lyrics, The Garden of Sadness (სევდის ბაღი, 1909) influenced by the 18th-century Georgian poet Besiki and his contemporary French Symbolist Paul Verlaine.

Study at Berlin, Zurich, and Leipzig (1911-1914) brought more pronounced influence of Symbolist narrative poetry.

During World War I, he joined the Georgian National Democratic Party advocating the independence from Russia and edited the newspaper Sakartvelo and the magazine Merani.

In 1925, Shanshiashvili gathered twenty years of his lyrics into The High Road I Have Travelled (გავლილი გზა), followed by a series of heroic poems.

At last, in 1930, he achieved fame throughout the Soviet Union with Anzor, an adapted translation into a Caucasian setting of Vsevolod Ivanov’s civil-war play Armoured Train 14-69.