Sargis Tsaishvili -95. from the Mountain Tops to the Peaks of Life

Abstract

Academician Sargis Tsaishvili - Rustaveliologist, Corresponding Member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences was born on December 20, 1929 in Tbilisi, in the family of a famous researcher of Georgian literature, Solomon Tsaishvili. In 1952 he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Tbilisi State University and continued his studies at the postgraduate course of the Shota Rustaveli Institute of the History of Georgian Literature. He also
defended his candidate and doctoral dissertations there. He was the director of the academic text-setting commission for "The Knight in the Panther's Skin", the head of the department and then the director of the Shota Rustaveli Institute of the History of Georgian Literature, the editor-in-chief of the journal "Literature and Art", the head of the Department of Georgian Language and Literature of the Georgian Technical University, the president of the Georgian Mountaineering Federation.

Sargis Tsaishvili made great efforts to create and strengthen the material and technical base of the academic text-setting commission for "The Knight in the Panther's Skin", to develop organizational forms of work. Under his leadership, the richest lexical fund, an annotated bibliography of Rustaveliological literature, was created. Sargis Tsaishvili, indeed, made a great contribution to the important work of establishing the text of “The knight in the Panther’s Skin”. This is evidenced by his famous work “History of the Text of “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin”, which was published in two volumes in 1970. Based on the study of 162 manuscripts and 32 fragments, the researcher has drawn many important conclusions.

It is worth mentioning the complete collection of works by Davit Guramishvili, published in 1980, which was compiled and included an introductory letter by Sargis Tsaishvili.