Abstract:
In the Soviet period, the stories about Mikha Khelashvili’s hectic life
and his poems were spread by word of mouth. Mikha Khelashvili’s poetry
was particularly popular among the mountain peoples due to certain reasons.
First, the poems the poet composed mainly in the Pshavi dialect were
close to folklore and folk motifs. The topics and motives Mikha Khelashvili
wrote about were a subject of interest and concern for people. Another
reason for his popularity was that Mikha Khelashvili remained in the memory
of the people as a hero who fought for the freedom of his homeland.
Mikha Khelashvili, a prominent fighter of Kakutsa Cholokashvili’s Band of
Sworn Men, lived and died in such a way, which are often the themes of big
tragedies in the works by genius writers. The killers hired by the Bolsheviks betrayed 25-year-old Mikha Khelashvili and killed him. The betrayal was especially
appalling as the young poet’s closest friends were its accomplices.
Mikha Khelashvili’s poetic masterpiece “The Ppoem to Uutter” has root
parallels with one of the Chechen folk songs “ The Eearth Wwill Ddry Uupon
Mmy Ggrave”, which L. Tolstoy attributed to the number of “wonderful songs
expressing revenge and strength”. This old Chechen song was fi rst included
by I. Ipolitov in his publication “Ethnographic Essay of the Arghun District”,
published in 1868 in Tbilisi, in Russian “Collection of data about Caucasian
mountains” (Сборник сведений о кавказских горцах).
The paper uses historical-comparative and structural methods to analyze
the parallels between Mikha Khelashvili’s poem and the Chechen folk
song.