A new exhibition in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is aimed at highlighting a dramatic chapter in the country’s past.
Workers at the Writers House of Georgia, a literary museum, say they were astonished to find that visiting tours of schoolchildren had no idea some of their favourite poets had been murdered by the Bolshevik regime.
Natasha Lomouri, the museum’s director, says this was a major reason for the new exhibition, the ‘Museum of Repressed Writers’, which is on permanent display at the Writers House.
The early decades of the 20th century seemed a promising time for culture, and Georgia was teeming with talent.
Among its writers, Paolo Iashvili stood out as the leader of a group of Georgian symbolist poets, the Blue Horns, who were influenced by the French avant-garde. Russian writers came for visits; Boris Pasternak, whose novel Doctor Zhivago was banned in the USSR over its criticism of the October Revolution, described Paolo Iashvili as ‘brilliant and engaging’.
The heyday of these writers was the short bloom of Georgia’s independent First Republic, between 1918 and 1921. But it wasn’t to last.
After Soviet forces occupied Georgia in 1921, the situation across the country turned grim. For the writers, the transaction was more devil than bargain. The Bolshevik authorities declared that writers had to subordinate artistic impulse to revolutionary mission. Attempts at sabotage would be answered with “the language of the bullet”. Many of the talented writers went quiet or were sidelined. Some, indeed, were spoken to in lead.
Iashvili is one of the writers who was put under pressure by the Soviet authorities, and his story is the focus of the new exhibition.
The Writer’s House building in Tbilisi’s Machabeli Street, known to many in the Georgian capital as the location of the grand Café Littera, is one of the city’s premier mansions, built for entrepreneur and philanthropist David Sarajishvili between 1903 and 1905. The ‘Museum of Repressed Writers’ exhibition is visually powerful, with key quotes in large letters, period photographs, and selected objects from the time, beautifully lit.
What happened here? Who did this? Tell me. Who stained our soil red? What turned the heavens black?Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze, 1956
Yet the grace of the new exhibition stands in contrast with what took place in the 1930s at the Union of Writers, an obligatory membership organisation whose aim was to increase Soviet state control on literature. During Stalin’s purges of 1937, in which thousands were imprisoned, tortured and murdered, the Sololaki district became the focus of a terrible drama, and the Writer’s House became its main stage. As detailed by Donald Rayfield, one of the leading historians of Georgia, the writers at the union denounced each other over a series of meetings that started in May 1937.
The charges were more explicit than in Franz Kafka’s Trial, but no less absurd. Writers were forced to defend themselves against the claims that they had been friends with people who had fatally fallen from Bolshevik grace. The denunciation sessions at the Union of Writers unfolded in consecutive sittings over several weeks and pitted Georgia’s most articulate people against each other. To speak up in anyone’s defence was to risk your life.
On 22 July 1937, after a series of attacks and denunciations against him, Paolo Iashvili came to the meeting, left, and shot himself next door with a hunting rifle. In moving goodbye letters to his wife and daughter, also on display at the museum, he wrote that he saw no “other way”. Six days after his suicide, the Georgian Union of Writers met again, and condemned Paolo Iashvili as a “pariah, traitor, and mercenary”.
‘We will all be judged’
The centrepiece of the exhibition consists of three letters. One of them is by Pasternak who, after hearing the news of Iashvili’s death, wrote to another poet, Titsian Tabidze: “What can I say? For what is it to me, such unthinkable suffering, the equal of which I have never known.” Pasternak adds that: “We will all be judged.”
Tabidze would be arrested ten weeks later and murdered by the Soviet authorities before the year was out.
Good museums offer engaging things to look at. Great museums change how we see the world. The Writer’s House of Georgia is an enchanting space – and, after visiting, we can see its significance even up to the present day, up to the recent attack on Salman Rushdie.
Tbilisi is always worth a visit, and the Museum of Repressed Writers now deserves to be part of the itinerary.
