The review article represents all issues concerning Rustaveli’s work. The main emphasis falls on the questions of ideal world view and the specificity of artistic style of the MPS. The article deals with the methodology issues of Rustaveli Studies as well.

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Medieval Georgian culture belongs to the cardinal process of Christian thinking development. It gradually reveals the basic steps of European Christian civilizations. In the late 12th and early 13th centuries, at the highest peak of its development, it represented the newest and the most modern tendencies of Christian thinking of those times.  However the highest peak of the medieval Georgian culture is Vepkhistkaosani – The Man in the Panther Skin (MPS) by Rustaveli, being one of the best examples of a synthesis of Eastern and Western cultural streams, literary in particular. At the same time, similar to the whole essence of Georgian religious-philosophical and literary process of those times, it belongs to European Christian civilization. By its artistic actualizing world view and aesthetic ideals of its epoch, MPS is one of the most significant works of world literature. 

There was a Georgian Monastery in the vicinity of Paris in the second half of the 19th century. Quite a few scholarly studies have been conducted in order to explore this Georgian centre. This article analyses some newly found facts, based on the materials obtained by the Director of Montauban Municipal Archive - Pascal Leroy, (the study by P. Leroy will be published in the current ssue of The Kartvelologist.

In the present edition of the journal “The Kartvelologist” several children’s rhymes by a famous Georgian literary critic Zaza Abzianidze are published with their parallel translations. Our choice was determined by two factors:

In the past decade Zaza Abzianidze has also become popular as a children’s author. We hope that foreign readers interested in learning modern Georgian will find several poems published here interesting and useful from the point of view of their refined literary style, lexis and parallel English translations. The poems and illustrations are taken from the author’s book “Busunsulebi”, published in 2009, by the Publishing House ‘Pegasi’.

The poems are translated into English by the modern American poet Lyn Coffin, who has also translated other works by Georgian poets, for example The Man in the Panther Skin has been released. It will be interesting for Georgian readers interested in the literary features of modern English poetry to observe the translation compared to the original version.

The translations are published from the book Zaza Abzianidze, Animalarky, translated by Lyn Coffin. The publication is agreed with the author.

The Editor

The previous article represents the relevance between Aristotelian and Rustvelian concepts of friendship. The author in the MPS focuses on the dynamicity of nature of the protagonist males and defines the changes, revealed through the dynamicity of the features of the characters, based upon the thoughts of a various philosophers.   

In spite of the fact that the most important moments relating to this foreign centre of Georgian culture, located in the Southern part of Paris and in the administrative centres of the Departments of Tarn-et-Garonne, the place where Georgian Fathers lived in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, have already been revealed based on the written primary sources of French archives, there still remain many obscure facts that need to be clarified.

In an attempt to fill in the above mentioned lacuna, along with several Georgian researchers interested in the history of the Montauban Georgian Centre (Z. Chichinadze, Sh. Lomsadze, I. Tabaghua, S. Grigalashvili, M. Javakhishvili) [2], I have also put all my efforts into the search for new information regarding the issue. With the active help of Avtandil Khurtsidze, a specialist of the French language and a staff member of Akaki Tseereteli State University, Department of International Relations, in November 2008, I appealed to the Mayor’s Office of Montauban to help me to obtain specific information regarding the materials stored in The Archives of Ancient Materials in relation to the issues we were interested in.