შოთა რუსთაველის პირველი პოლონელი მკვლევარი და მთარგმნელი

Abstract

The appeal of Polish writers to Shota Rustaveli’s poem was a much more ambiguous phenomenon than an appeal to the text of the great poet. Rustaveli became a kind of symbol of a country with an ancient culture. In the 19th century, when literary and cultural contacts between many peoples had just started to take on a permanent character, such an understanding of the whole country through its supreme genius was natural. In 1833, in Telescope was published the article “Shota Rustaveli, Georgian Poet”, which for a long time was considered as the first personal article in the Russian press. It noted that Pyotr Dubrovsky had translated it from Polish, the author himself was not named. Some information from the biography of Rustaveli was widespread in people’s mind. They were reflected even in the literary monuments of the Renaissance - in “Rostomiani” and “Iosebzilihaniani”. However, in addition to the mysterious awareness of the author, his work attracts attention from many other sides. It contains a sincere interest in the poem and the role of Rustaveli in Georgian society: “The Poem of Vepkhistkaosani” is written using Shairi poems. This kind of poetry consists of quatrains with the same rhymes. The author of the article compares Rustaveli’s poem with “Furious Roland” by Ariosto and with “Jerusalem Liberated” by Torquato Tasso, with the poems of Ossian. Such a comparison was apparently necessary for the European reader; it gave him a certain cultural reference point, incorrect in its typological basis, but giving an idea of the scale of the phenomenon. After that, the content of the poem is retold on one page and rather imprecisely. We can say that the retelling does not represent an independent value. However, the comments are distinguished by a subtle understanding of the meaning of the poem, or rather, its role in Georgian culture. For a long time it was believed that the author of the article was the famous Polish Arabist Alleksandr Khodzko (1804-1891). The research was carried out by many and almost simultaneously. The solution was made by professor from Wroclaw, literary historian Waclaw Kubatsky. The author notes that “it is not difficult for a researcher of Polish romanticism to point out the original of this pioneering Russian study” (Kubatsky 1969: 283). His Polish text appeared in Vilno (Vilnius) in 1830 in the “Lithuanian Calendar for 1831” published by Ippolit Klimaszewski. The essay is titled “Shota Rustaveli, Georgian poet”. Further, Kubatsky retells an article already known in Russian. It is surprising why the authorship of Rdultovsky was not discovered by an orientalist of the same level as Jan Reichman, who more than once wrote that there are many mysteries in Georgian-Polish relations. According to Prof. L. Menabde, K. Rdultovsky had to refer to the original, to the “Vakhtangov” edition of “Vepkhistkaosani” and comments to it (Rustaveli 1712), although there is no information about the knowledge of the Georgian language by Rdultovsky. It can be assumed that he was assisted by someone from the Orientalists’ circle of Vilno, many members of which knew Georgian.