Lasha bakradze biography of alberta

John Steinbeck traveled to Soviet Georgia in 1947 and marveled afterward that Georgian poetry was read there “by everyone,” that Georgian poets “were buried on an equal footing with their kings.”¹ Steinbeck, however, was likely unaware of Paolo Iashvili, a leader of Georgia’s Blue Horns, a group of Symbolist poets that was part of a doomed starburst of modernism in Eastern Europe.

Iashvili had shot himself dead ten years before Steinbeck’s visit, as Stalin’s Great Terror of 1936–1938 killed writers and attempted to wipe them from memory. The Russian writer Boris Pasternak, who had stayed with Iashvili in Tiflis (as the capital, Tbilisi, was known before 1936) and had translated his poems for rapt readers in Moscow, wrote to Iashvili’s widow, Tamar, that the forty-four-year-old’s suicide “gripped me by the throat.”²

In Old Tbilisi, a small museum has taken shape on the site