Paolo Iashvili

 Paolo 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.

Paolo 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 ("Blue Horns"). 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.