Paolo Iashvili (პაოლო იაშვილი; 29 June 1894 – 22 July 1937) was a Georgian poet and one of the leaders of the Georgian symbolist movement. Under the Soviet Union, his obligatory conformism and the loss of his friends at the height of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge heavily affected Iashvili, who committed suicide at the Writers’ Union of Georgia.
Early life
Born near
Kutaisi, western Georgia (then part of
Imperial Russia), he was educated at Kutaisi,
Anapa, and
Paris. Returning to Georgia in 1915, he became one of the cofounders and ideologues of the Georgian symbolist group
Blue Horns, and edited the literary magazine
Tsisperi Qantsebi ("Blue Horns"). Early in the 1920s, Iashvili, "brilliant, polished, cultural, an amusing talker, European and good-looking" as described by his close friend and translator
Boris Pasternak,
[Lang, David M. (1962), A Modern History of Georgia, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p. 255.] emerged as a leader of Georgian post-Symbolist and experimental poetry. His devotion to mysticism and "pure art" faded under the
Soviet Union ideological pressure in the late 1920s, when the classics of Georgian literature were effectively banned and the Georgian literary establishment was pressured into submission to socialist dogmas. Many leading writers were virtually silenced, for Iashvili becoming a publicity agent for the
hydroelectricity engineer
Vladimir Jikia. On his coming to power,
Lavrenty Beria restored many Georgian writers to favor in an attempt to push them into a Soviet ideological camp.
[Rayfield, Donald (2000), : 2nd edition, p. 264. Routledge, .] The contamination of former Symbolists by socialist dogma was a painful process, but Iashvili had finally to adapt to the Soviet doctrines, for his poetry becoming more and more ideological in essence. Beria even made him a member of the Transcaucasian Central Committee.
The Great Purge
At the height of the 1930s Great Purges, he made desperate attempts to extricate himself by confessing his "errors in judgment" and reiterating his devotion to Stalin and Beria. He witnessed and even had to participate in public trials that ousted many of his associates from the Writers' Union, effectively condemning them to death. Under Beria’s pressure, he labeled the
France writer and his former friend André Gide as "treacherous, black-faced
Trotskyite cur". The betrayal of his ideals completely demoralized the poet. Presented by Beria with the alternative of denouncing his lifelong friend and fellow Symbolist poet
Titsian Tabidze, or being arrested and tortured by the
NKVD, Iashvili went to the Writers' Union office and shot himself dead on 22 July 1937.
[Tarkhan-Mouravi, George (January 19, 1997), 70 years of Soviet Georgia. Retrieved on May 14, 2007.] The Union’s session went on to pass a resolution stating that Iashvili posed as a litterateur while engaging in treason and espionage, and maintaining that his suicide during the course of their meeting was "a provocative act that arouses loathing and indignation in every decent gathering of Soviet writers."
[Barnes, Christopher J. (2004), Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, p. 146. Cambridge University Press, .] Only one fellow writer,
Kolau Nadiradze, dared to attend Paolo Iashvili's funeral.
Burial and Commemoration
Paolo Iashvili is buried in the
Didube Pantheon and his legacy was remembered in a dedicated exhibition at the Museum of Repressed Writers at the Writer's House of Georgia.
Further reading
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Mikaberidze, Alexander (ed., 2007), Iashvili, Paolo. Dictionary of Georgian National Biography. Retrieved on May 15, 2007.
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Rayfield, Donald (1982), Pasternak and the Georgians. Irish Slavonic Studies, 3: 39–46.
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Rayfiled, Donald (1990), The Death of Paolo Iashvili. Slavonic and East European Review, 68 no. 3: 631–64.
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