Shio Aragvispireli was a penname of Shio Dedabrishvili ; December 14, 1867 – January 2, 1926), a Georgian

Georgia (country)

Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...

 writer popular for his stories of protest against social inequality, the reality of oppressed peasants and underlings and decadent lords, and the struggle between individual happiness and social dogmas.

He was born into a priest’s family near Dusheti

Dusheti

Dusheti is a town in Georgia, situated in the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region, 54 km northeast of the nation’s capital of Tbilisi.Dusheti is located on both banks of the small mountainous river of Dushetis-Khevi at the foothills of the Greater Caucasus crest at an elevation of 900 m above sea level...

, and enrolled in the Tbilisi

Tbilisi

Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936...

 theological seminary in 1883. In 1887, he was excluded from the seminary for his rebellious ideas, but restored again in 1889. From 1890 to 1895 he studied at the Warsaw

Warsaw

Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...

 veterinary college, where he engaged in a student underground society. 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. Aragvispireli brought his personal working experience into a series of short stories from 1895 and quickly won popularity. One of his best stories, It's Earth (მიწაა) appeared in 1901. It 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

Alexander Kazbegi

Alexander Kazbegi was a Georgian writer, famous for his 1883 novel The Patricide.Kazbegi was the great grandson of Kazibek Chopikashvili, a local feudal magnate who was in charge of collecting tolls on the Georgian Military Highway...

. 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. It even earned appraisal from the Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

critics who had frequently attacked Aragvispireli’s gruesome Expressionism. His later years were unproductive.