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Paolo Iashvili: Remembering Georgian poet who died in Stalin’s purge [1]

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Date: 2023-07

A new exhibition in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is aimed at highlighting a dramatic chapter in the country’s past.

Workers at the Writers House of Georgia, a literary museum, say they were astonished to find that visiting tours of schoolchildren had no idea some of their favourite poets had been murdered by the Bolshevik regime.

Natasha Lomouri, the museum’s director, says this was a major reason for the new exhibition, the ‘Museum of Repressed Writers’, which is on permanent display at the Writers House.

The early decades of the 20th century seemed a promising time for culture, and Georgia was teeming with talent.

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Among its writers, Paolo Iashvili stood out as the leader of a group of Georgian symbolist poets, the Blue Horns, who were influenced by the French avant-garde. Russian writers came for visits; Boris Pasternak, whose novel Doctor Zhivago was banned in the USSR over its criticism of the October Revolution, described Paolo Iashvili as ‘brilliant and engaging’.

The heyday of these writers was the short bloom of Georgia’s independent First Republic, between 1918 and 1921. But it wasn’t to last.

After Soviet forces occupied Georgia in 1921, the situation across the country turned grim. For the writers, the transaction was more devil than bargain. The Bolshevik authorities declared that writers had to subordinate artistic impulse to revolutionary mission. Attempts at sabotage would be answered with “the language of the bullet”. Many of the talented writers went quiet or were sidelined. Some, indeed, were spoken to in lead.

Iashvili is one of the writers who was put under pressure by the Soviet authorities, and his story is the focus of the new exhibition.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/museum-repressed-writers-georgia-poetry-soviet-purges-paolo-iashvili/

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