Galaktion Tabidze

Galaktion Tabidze was one of the most important Georgian poets of the twentieth century. Writing in Georgian, he shaped the work of every generation of poets that followed him. His life spanned the late Russian Empire, the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia and the Soviet Union, so his career also reflects much of his country's cultural history in those decades.

He was born in 1891 (some sources give 1892) in the village of Chqvishi, near Vani in western Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, a village teacher, died shortly before he was born. He studied at seminaries in Kutaisi and Tiflis and later worked as a teacher himself. His first book, shaped by Symbolism, was well received in 1914, though he was slower than some fellow members of the Blue Horns group to win recognition. His poetry returns again and again to isolation, the absence of love and uneasy premonitions. With the collection Skull with Artistic Flowers (1919) he became the leading voice of Georgian poetry for several decades. His cousin, the poet Titsian Tabidze, nicknamed him the "Chevalier of the Order of Loneliness", a nod to his preference for solitude.

The 1930s brought hardship. During the repressions of 1937, his wife Olga Okudzhava was arrested and, as the record shows, executed in 1941 together with other inmates of Oryol Prison. Titsian Tabidze was also arrested and eventually executed. Galaktion himself was interrogated and severely tortured. Plunged into depression and alcoholism, he survived partly through his silence and seclusion, continuing to receive official honours and to publish new poems, although his life had been deeply disrupted.

In 1959 he was admitted to a hospital in Tbilisi, where he took his own life by jumping from a window. He was buried in the Mtatsminda Pantheon, and tens of thousands attended his funeral. In 2000 the Georgian Orthodox Church formally absolved him of the sin of suicide.

His legacy rests on thousands of poems that place him among Georgia's greatest poets. His archive of roughly 100,000 items at the Literary Museum in Tbilisi has still not been fully studied. His work has been translated into Russian, French, English and German.