Paolo Iashvili
პაოლო იაშვილი Paolo Iashvili | |
|---|---|
Georgian SSR, Soviet Union | |
| Occupation | poet |
| Language | Georgian |
| Nationality | Georgian |
| Genre | poetry, symbolism |
| Literary movement | Blue Horns |
Paolo Iashvili (Georgian: 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
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
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.[3] 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."[4]
References
- ^ Lang, David M. (1962), A Modern History of Georgia, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p. 255.
- ISBN 0-7007-1163-5.
- ^ Tarkhan-Mouravi, George (January 19, 1997), 70 years of Soviet Georgia. Retrieved on May 14, 2007.
- ISBN 0-521-52073-8.
Further reading
- Mikaberidze, Alexander (ed., 2007), Iashvili, Paolo. Dictionary of Georgian National Biography. Retrieved on May 15, 2007.
- Rayfield, Donald (1982), Pasternak and the Georgians. Irish Slavonic Studies, 3: 39–46.
- Rayfiled, Donald (1990), The Death of Paolo Iashvili. Slavonic and East European Review, 68 no. 3: 631–64.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Paolo Iashvili.
- (in Georgian) The website dedicated to Paolo Iashvili.
- Gould, Rebecca, Georgian Literary Modernism: Poems by Titsian Tabidze, Paolo Iashvili and Galaktion Tabidze. Metamorphosis: A Journal of Literary Translation, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 66–103, 2009.
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