Prince Nikoloz "Tato" Baratashvili (Georgian: ნიკოლოზ "ტატო" ბარათაშვილი) (December 4, 1817 - October 21, 1845) was a Georgian poet, one of the first Georgians to marry a modern nationalism with European Romanticism and to introduce "Europeanism" into Georgian literature. Despite his early death and a tiny literary heritage of fewer than forty short lyrics, one extended poem, and a few private letters, Baratashvili is considered to be the high point of Georgian Romanticism.[1] He was referred as the "Georgian Byron".[2][3] Nikoloz Baratashvili, affectionately known as Tato (ტატო), was born in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia's capital, which was then a principal city of Russian Transcaucasia. His father, Prince Meliton Baratashvili (1795–1860), was an impoverished nobleman working for the Russian administration. His mother, Ephemia Orbeliani (1801–1849), was a sister of the Georgian poet and general Prince Grigol Orbeliani and a scion of the penultimate Georgian king Erekle II. Baratashvili graduated, in 1835, from a Tiflis gymnasium for nobility, where he was tutored by Solomon Dodashvili, a Georgian patriot and liberal philosopher.[4] The tragic quality of Baratashvili’s poetry was determined by his traumatic personal life as well as the contemporary political situation in his homeland. The failure of the 1832 anti-Russian conspiracy of Georgian nobles, with which Baratashvili was a schoolboy sympathizer, forced many conspirators to see the independent past as irremediably lost and to reconcile themselves with the Russian autocracy, transforming their laments for the lost past and the fall of the native dynasty into Romanticist poetry. Shortage of money prevented Baratashvili from continuing his studies in Russian universities, while an early physical injury – his lameness – did not allow him to enter military service as he wished. Eventually, Baratashvili had to enter the Russian bureaucratic service and serve as an ordinary clerk in the disease-ridden Azerbaijani town of Ganja. The love of his life, Princess Ekaterine Chavchavadze, rejected him and married David Dadiani, Prince of Mingrelia.