Mdivani

thumb|Simon Mdivani, politician and Georgian [[ambassador to the Ottoman Empire]] The Mdivani family () is a Georgian noble family with the rank of aznauri (untitled nobility).

==History== Outside of Georgia, the best known bearers of this name were the children of General Zakhari Mdivani (1867–1933), who served as the aide-de-camp to the Tsar of Russia, and his Georgian-Polish wife, Elizabeth Viktorovna Sabalewska (1884–1922), a socialite and close friend of Rasputin. The five siblings fled penniless to France and the US after the Soviet invasion of Georgia in 1921, and became known as the "Marrying Mdivanis", as they all married into wealth and fame. They were a media staple of their time and are often regarded as pioneers of the modern concept of the "lifestyle celebrity." Their phenomenon was analyzed by Dale Carnegie in his landmark book How to Win Friends and Influence People, with some calling it the "Mdivani Spell". F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, referenced the Mdivani as a symbol of celebrity at the time; food dishes and fashion styles were named after them; and they even came up in a U.S. congressional hearing in 1935. British biographer Ralph Hewins, known for his works on J. Paul Getty, had planned to publish a biography of the Mdivani family based on decades of research, but family events ultimately halted the project.