Vasil Abashidze (December 4, 1854 – October 9, 1926) was 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...

 theater actor and a founder of a realistic acting tradition in Georgia.

Born in 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...

, Georgia, then part of Tiflis Governorate

Tiflis Governorate

Tiflis Governorate was one of the guberniyas of the Russian Empire with its centre in Tiflis . In 1897 it constituted 44,607 sq. kilometres in area and had a population of 1,051,032 inhabitants...

, Russian Empire

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

, Abashidze worked as a teacher in Kutaisi

Kutaisi

Kutaisi is Georgia's second largest city and the capital of the western region of Imereti. It is 221 km to the west of Tbilisi.-Geography:...

 and Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...

. At the same time, he played for amateur theatre troupes in Kutaisi. In 1879, he joined the renewed professional Georgian dramatic troupe in Tiflis and featured in comedies by both Georgian and foreign authors. His best roles included Famusov (Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit

Woe from Wit

Woe from Wit is Alexander Griboyedov's comedy in verse, satirizing the society of post-Napoleonic Moscow, or, as a high official in the play styled it, "a pasquinade on Moscow."The play, written in 1823 in the countryside and in Tiflis, was not passed by the censorship for the stage, and...

), Khlestakov (Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

’s The Government Inspector), Belogubov and Iusov (Alexander Ostrovsky’s A Lucrative Post), and Tartuffe and Argan (Molière

Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...

’s The Imaginary Invalid). He translated and adapted over 42 comedies and vaudevilles, and in 1885 he founded the theatrical paper Teatri ("The Theater"). In 1922, he was granted the title of People's Artist

People's Artist

People's Artist is a honorary title in the Soviet Union, Union republics, in some other Eastern bloc states , as well as in a number of post-Soviet states, modeled after the title of the People's Artist of the USSR....

 by Soviet Georgia. Abashidze’s name has been given to the Tbilisi Music and Drama State Theatre. He is buried at the Mtatsminda Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures

Mtatsminda Pantheon

The Mtatsminda Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures is a necropolis in Tbilisi, Georgia, where some of the most prominent writers, artists, scholars, and national heroes of Georgia are buried. It is located in the churchyard around St. David’s Church "Mamadaviti" on the slope of Mount Mtatsminda...

in Tbilisi.