Titsian Tabidze

Poet of the Blue Horns, shot in 1937

1895–1937

Titsian Tabidze (1895-1937) was born in the Imeretian village of Chkvishi and became one of the founders of the Blue Horns, the circle of young Georgian symbolists gathered in 1916. He was the group's main ideologue; it began by attacking the classics and ended by becoming one.

His closest friend was Boris Pasternak: they wrote to each other for years, Pasternak translated his verse and described him as a reserved and complicated soul, capable of self-sacrifice.

On the tenth of October 1937 Tabidze was expelled from the Writers' Union, soon arrested on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and treason, and shot the same year. Under interrogation he named as his fellow conspirator the eighteenth-century poet Besiki. For almost twenty years his family believed him alive; the truth came out only in the mid-fifties. His friend Paolo Iashvili, not waiting for arrest, shot himself in the building of the Writers' Union.