Shanshiashvili was born in the small village Jugaani near Sighnaghi ( then part of the Russian Empire ) . In the 1900s , he was noted for his dramas in verse and prose . At the same time , he engaged in revolutionary movement against the Tsarist rule and was put in prison in 1908 . He then began writing long poems based on Greek legends of Colchis and composed his conventionally titled book of lyrics , '' The Garden of Sadness '' ( სევდის ბაღი , 1909 ) influenced by the 18th-century Georgian poet Besiki and his contemporary French Symbolist Paul Verlaine . Around 1910 , he was praised by critics as the most promising and the most Europeanized Georgian poet . Study at Berlin , Zurich , and Leipzig ( 1911-1914 ) brought more pronounced influence of Symbolist narrative poetry . During World War I , he joined the Georgian National Democratic Party advocating the independence from Russia and edited the newspaper '' Sakartvelo '' and the magazine '' Merani '' . In 1925 , Shanshiashvili gathered twenty years of his lyrics into '' The High Road I Have Travelled '' ( გავლილი გზა ) , followed by a series of heroic poems . At last , in 1930 , he achieved fame throughout the Soviet Union with '' Anzor '' , an adapted translation into a Caucasian setting of Vsevolod Ivanov ’s civil-war play '' Armoured Train 14-69 '' . Sandro Akhmeteli , director of the Rustaveli Theatre , transformed the play into a Wagnerian spectacle . The " left " Soviet critics immediately attacked '' Anzor '' for trivializing the revolution . In the 1930s , endangered by the Stalinist purges due to his ties with the purged Georgian intellectuals , he made half-hearted attempts to praise Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria . His later dramas draw factually on the misfortunes of the 18th-century Georgia and the civil war catastrophes . He was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1949
purges
Great Purge
Sandro Shanshiashvili