Mtskheta is the ancient capital of Georgia, founded there, “where, merging, rustling, / Embracing like two sisters, / Arahwa and Kury Strui.” Immediately, in Mtskheta, and Svetitskhoveli Cathedral with the tombs of the last kings of independent Georgia, “handed over” their own people “to the one-faith Russia. Since then, and blessed by the grace of God’s long-suffering country – it blossoms and prosperes, “not fearing enemies, / Beyond the bounds of friendly bayonets.”
“Once a Russian general / I drove from the mountains to Tiflis, he was taking the child of the prisoner.” He realized that he would not take the child to Tiflis alive in such a state, the general leaves a prisoner in Mtskheta, in the local monastery there. Mtskhetsky monks, righteous men, devotees, enlighteners, having cured and christened a foundling, bring him up in a truly Christian spirit. And it seems that hard and unselfish work achieves the
goal. Having forgotten his native language and got used to captivity, Mtsyri speaks Georgian fluently. Yesterday’s savage “is ready in the color of years to utter a monastic vow.” And suddenly, on the eve of the solemn event, the adoptive son disappears, imperceptibly slipping out of the monastery fortress at a terrible hour when the holy fathers, fearful of the storm, crowded like lambs around the altar. The fugitive, naturally, is looking for the whole monastery’s army and, as it should, for three days. To no avail. However, after a while the Mtsyri still find, by chance, some strangers – and not in the depths of the Caucasus Mountains, but in the immediate vicinity of Mtskheta. Having identified in the senselessness of the monastery’s servant lying on the scorched heat, they bring him to the monastery. When Mtsyri comes to himself, the monks interrogate him. He is silent. He is tried to force feed, because the fugitive is exhausted, as if he suffered a long illness or exhausting labor. Mtsyri refuses food. Having guessed that the stubborn man was deliberately hurrying his “end,”
Mtsyri sent the same black man who once left him and baptized him. The good old man is sincerely attached to the ward and very much wants his pupil, since he was born to die so young, fulfilled the Christian duty, repented and received the remission of sins before his death. But Mtsyri does not repent at all in a daring act. On the contrary! He is proud of him as a feat! Because in the wild he lived and lived as all his ancestors lived-in alliance with the wild nature-as sharp as eagles, wise as snakes, strong as mountain leopards. Unarmed, Mtsyri enters into single combat with this royal beast, the owner of the local dense forests. And, after defeating him honestly, he proves that he could “be at the edge of the fathers / Not from the last of the Udalts.” The feeling of will returns to the young man even what seemed to have forever forfeited bondage: the memory of childhood. He recalls his native speech, his native village, and the faces of his relatives – his father, sisters, brothers. Moreover, even for a brief moment, life in alliance with the wild nature makes him a great poet. Telling the black man that he saw what he had experienced, wandering in the mountains, Mtsyri chooses words that are strikingly similar to the primordial nature of the mighty nature of the region. And only one sin weighs his soul. This sin is a perjury. For once, long ago, as a young man, the fugitive swore to himself with a terrible oath that he would run away from the monastery and find the path to his native limits. And now he seems to stick to the right direction: he goes, runs, rushes, crawls, climbs – to the east, to the east, to the east. All the time, day and night, the sun, the stars – to the east of Mtskheta! And suddenly he discovers that, having made a circle, he returned to the very place from which his escape began, the feat of Escape, to the immediate vicinity of Mtskheta; from here you can give up to the monastic monastery that sheltered it! And this, in the understanding of Mtsyri, is not a simple unfortunate oversight. Years spent in “prison”, in dungeons,
Life in captivity extinguished the “ray-guide” in his soul, that is, the unmistakably correct, almost animal feeling of his path, which every mountaineer possesses from birth, and without which neither man nor beast can survive in the wild abysses of the central Caucasus. Yes, Mtsyri escaped from the monastery fortress, but that inner prison, the constraint that civilizers built in his soul, he already does not destroy! It is this terrible tragic discovery, and not the ragged wounds inflicted by the leopard, that kill in Mtsyri the instinct of life, the thirst for life with which the true and not foster children of nature come into the world. A born freedom-loving person, he, in order not to live as a slave, dies like a slave: humbly, without cursing anyone. The only thing about which he asks his jailers to be buried in that corner of the monastery garden, from where “the Caucasus is also visible.”
