Elena Akhvlediani, just as the other artists of her generation - David Kakabadze, Lado Gudiashvili and Keto Magalashvili - started her works in the early decades of the twentieth century. These masters' achievements, based on the legacy of national and European cultures, have largely determined the distinctive features of Georgian art and have not lost their importance to this day.
The interests of Akhvlediani were diverse and included painting, drawing, stage and costume design, and book illustration. But she has gone down in the history of Georgian art as, above all, a master of genre and lyrical landscape painting. Especially prominent in her artistic legacy are the views of Tbilisi, the city in which she had lived many years, which she loved as her own, and to the preservation of whose historical peculiarities she had given much of her energies.
The artist's studio, in one of the Tbilisi twisting streets, was indeed a cultural center. The place where artists, actors, musicians, poets and her numerous friends often gathered. The character and inclinations of Akhvlediani had formed in her childhood and had little changed with the passing of time.
Her parents were people out of the common. Her father, Dimity Akhvlediani, born in a poor family, in his youth earned his living by giving private lessons. After finishing secondary school in 1884, he became a student of the Kharkov university medical department. His participation in students' disturbances, arrest and the subsequent expulsion and blacklisting would have deprived him of the opportunity of completing his education, if not for the protection of one of the professors, who supported the talented student.
Dimity Akhvlediani entered the Odessa university, this time the natural sciences department. His works as a student on the structure of the Odessa granite and the origin of oil were met with much interest among specialists and opened up bright prospects to the young man. Nevertheless the love of medicine proved stronger, and, having finished the university, Akhvlediani entered the St. Petersburg military medical academy. Again years of study followed under the guidance of such most prominent specialists as S. Botkin, I. Pavlov and I. Tarkhanov. His studies at the academy completed, he returned to Georgia and wholly devoted himself to his favourite occupation. Purposefulness and will in Dimity Aklvlediani were combined with his natural subtlety, feeling and imagination.
We still have his poems which he dedicated to his wife, Elizabeth Eristavi. They were an excellent couple. Elizabeth, a princess by birth, shared her husband's democratic views and helped him in all his undertakings, including the establishment of a free outpatient clinic. Elizabeth also had to shoulder the family cares: the education of five children, singing lessons, and book reading in the evening. One could often hear Georgian songs sung in their home.
Elena Akhvlediani had a beautiful voice. As it was her dream to become a singer, she intensively studied singing. Having chosen the profession of an artist, she did not give up music. "Indeed, I love music more than all other arts, even my own, " she wrote in one of her letters. But that was later. |
