Paolo Iashvili

(Pavel Dzhibraelovich Iashvili). Born June 17 (29), 1895, in the village of Argveti, in what is now Sachkhere Raion, Georgian SSR; died July 22, 1937, in Tbilisi. Soviet Georgian poet and public figure.

Iashvili, the son of a nobleman, began publishing his works in 1911. In his early poems he criticized bourgeois life. In 1916 he founded the literary group of Georgian symbolists known as the Blue Horns. A realistic tendency inherent in his poetry dictated the high civic spirit of his mature works. He hailed the establishment of Soviet power in Georgia. In the poems “To a New Georgia,” “To the Engineers of Poetry,” and “Poet and Man” he declared that the supreme duty of literature is to express the heroic spirit of the new age. In the same works he appealed to his countrymen to serve the socialist fatherland and promote friendship among peoples. His cycle of poems New Colchis is a hymn to the builders of socialism.

Iashvili, a poet of remarkable skill, was significant for reforming Georgian versification and introducing new poetic forms. He was elected a candidate member of the Central Executive Committee of Georgia in 1924 and a member of the Transcaucasian Central Executive Committee in 1934.