Because of his patriotic views Javakhishvili was arrested and exiled several times even during the era of
Russian Empire. After the crash of The First
Georgian Democratic Republic and
annexing of the country by the Russian
Bolshevik Regime, he always was under special surveillance because of his views and former membership of
National-Democratic Party. In 1924 he had been suspected of participating in the patriotic rebellion and was imprisoned and after series of interrogations and tortures proscribed to death. He survived only because of the "kind mood" of
Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who was personally asked by Javakhishvili's close friends historian
Pavle Ingorokva and physician
Nikoloz Kipshidze. Although relations between writer and governing regime were always tense, in 1930, Javakhishvili clashed with
Malakia Toroshelidze, president of the Union of Writers and
People's Commissar for Education, suspected to be
Trotskyist, after the latter's ban on the classics of Georgian literature. Upon
Lavrenty Beria's coming to power, the ban was revoked, and Javakhishvili for a short time gained favor. His
Arsena of Marabda was republished, and both dramatized and filmed. However, he was not able to escape bitter criticism from the Bolsheviks even after he published, in 1936, the moderate ''
A Woman's Burden'' (ქალის ტვირთი), an attempt at a
Socialist realist novel. That was a story of a revolutionary but
bourgeoisie woman, Ketevan, whose lover, a
Bolshevik underground worker Zurab, persuades her to marry a Tsarist
gendarme officer, Avsharov, whom she is to kill. The Soviet ideologist
Vladimir Yermilov condemned the novel, claiming that it illustrated Bolsheviks as pure terrorists and made gendarmes too chivalrous. Soon, Beria resented Javakhishvili's refusal to seek his advice over the representation of Bolshevik activities in pre-revolutionary Georgia. Furthermore, Javakhishvili was suspected of warning the writer
Grigol Robakidze of impending arrest and assisting him in defecting to Germany back in 1930. The matters went to a head when, in 1936, he was accused of praising the French author
André Gide whose ''Retour de l'URSS'' and the book's praise of Georgian writers reclassified both Gide and Javakhishvili into enemies. On 22 July 1937, when the poet
Paolo Iashvili shot himself in the Union of Writers building, and the Union's session went on to pass a resolution denouncing the poet's move as an
anti-Soviet provocation, Javakhishvili was the sole person present to praise the poet's courage. Four days later, on 26 July, the presidium of the Union voted: "Mikheil Javakhishvili, as an enemy of the people, a spy and diversant, is to be expelled from the Union of Writers and physically annihilated." His friends and colleagues, including those already in prison, were forced to incriminate Javakhishvili as a counter-revolutionary terrorist. Only the critic
Geronti Kikodze left the Union's session in protest rather than give his consent to the resolution. The novelist was arrested on 14 August 1937 and tortured in the presence of Beria until he signed a "confession". He was shot on 30 September 1937. His property was confiscated, and his archives destroyed, his brother shot, and his widow sent into exile. Javakhisvhili remained censored until the late 1950s when he was
rehabilitated and republished. Some episodes from his biography like those from
Dimitri Shevardnadze were further used by
Tengiz Abuladze in his film
Repentance (). A small part of his legacy is preserved in the Mikhail Javakhishvili house museum in central Tbilisi, where the writer used to live, in an apartment that is also inhabited by descendants of the family. == Bibliography ==