Paolo Iashvili

Who was Paolo Iashvili?

Paolo Iashvili was a Georgian poet and one of the leaders of 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.

Born near Kutaisi, western Georgia, 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. 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, emerged as a leader of Georgian post-Symbolist and experimental poetry. His devotion to mysticism and "pure art" faded under the Soviet 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 hydroelectric engineer Valodia 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. 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.