Background
He was born into a priest’s family near Dusheti, and enrolled in the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in 1883.
He was born into a priest’s family near Dusheti, and enrolled in the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in 1883.
From 1890 to 1895 he studied at the Warsaw veterinary college, where he engaged in a student underground society.
In 1887, he was excluded from the seminary for his rebellious ideas, but restored again in 1889. He was arrested by the Imperial Russian police for having formed the League for Georgia’s Freedom in Warsaw. He then worked as a veterinary inspector in the Tbilisi slaughterhouse, until he was sacked as a "whistle-blower" in a scandal about contaminated pork.
One of his best stories, lieutenant"s Earth (მიწაა) appeared in 1901.
lieutenant was a story of a consumptive Georgian convict exiled to Siberia and killed there for refusing to throw away a bag of Georgian earth he has kept for his grave. Aragvispireli married contemporary European influences, particularly Maupassant and Przybyszewski to native traditions of idealization of the primitive typical to the Georgian mountaineer writers such as Alexander Kazbegi.
In his drama Shio the Prince (შიო თავადი, 1905), he took a Symbolist view of Georgian history, but it failed. His most successful work, the novel A Fractured Heart (გაბზარული გული, 1920), was a sentimental fairy-tale of the love of a princess and a goldsmith.
lieutenant even earned appraisal from the Soviet critics who had frequently attacked Aragvispireli’s gruesome Expressionism.
His later years were unproductive.
