Vakhtang VI, King of Kartli. Poems and Narrative Poems (Leksebi da poemebi). Edited with a foreword by Al. Baramidze, 1975. In Georgian.

ვახტანგ VI (1675-1737).
ლექსები და პოემები / ალექსანდრე ბარამიძის რედაქციითა და წინასიტყვაობით.
თბილისი : „მეცნიერება", 1975. 197 გვერდი, ილუსტრაციებით ; 26 სმ.
მაგარი ყდა. ტირაჟი 8 000 ც.
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Vakhtang VI, King of Kartli (1675-1737). Poems and Narrative Poems / edited with a foreword by Aleksandre Baramidze.
Tbilisi : "Metsniereba" Publishing House, 1975. 197 pp. : illustrated ; 26 cm.
Hardcover. Print run of 8,000 copies.
Binding good: spine head and tail frayed with loss of cloth, corners worn. Text block good: leaves age-toned; text complete and clean.

Vakhtang VI (1675-1737) was king of Kartli, a statesman, lawgiver, scholar, printer and poet. He revised the legal code known as Dasturlamali (1707-1709), founded the first Georgian printing press in Tbilisi in 1709 and translated the Persian fable collection Kalila and Dimna into Georgian. After the collapse of Georgian hopes in the 1720s he left for Russia in 1724 and died in exile at Astrakhan in 1737. Alongside his work in law and learning he wrote patriotic and love lyrics, and this volume gathers his poems and narrative poems in one scholarly edition. It was prepared by Aleksandre Baramidze (1902-1994), a doctor of philology (1936) and academician from 1960, author of the multi-volume Essays on the History of Georgian Literature and editor of more than a hundred scholarly publications. The edition was issued for the 300th anniversary of the poet's birth, a year marked by the emblem "300" facing the title page and by a foreword to the poems. Its typographic decoration, with ornamental headpieces and a running lion vignette on the text pages, is by A. Dumbadze. The print run of 8,000 copies was large for a scholarly Georgian title, so the book is not rare. It is, however, the standard 20th-century reading edition of the poems and has a limited audience outside Georgia. It will interest collectors of Georgian classics and eighteenth-century Georgian literature, students of the Bagrationi dynasty and of the culture of the Kartli court, and readers of Soviet-era Georgian academic publishing.