Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.
The culture of Georgia has evolved over the country's long history, providing it with a unique national identity and a strong literary tradition based on the Georgian language and alphabet. This strong sense of national identity has helped to preserve Georgian distinctiveness despite repeated periods of foreign occupation.
The Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic was one of the republics of the Soviet Union from its second occupation in 1921 to its independence in 1991. Coterminous with the present-day republic of Georgia, it was based on the traditional territory of Georgia, which had existed as a series of independent states in the Caucasus prior to the first occupation of annexation in the course of the 19th century. The Georgian SSR was formed in 1921 and subsequently incorporated in the Soviet Union in 1922. Until 1936 it was a part of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, which existed as a union republic within the USSR. From November 18, 1989, the Georgian SSR declared its sovereignty over Soviet laws. The republic was renamed the Republic of Georgia on November 14, 1990, and subsequently became independent before the dissolution of the Soviet Union on April 9, 1991, whereupon each former SSR became a sovereign state.
Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian ancestry. He was one of the founders of the Soviet genre called "author song", or "guitar song", and the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions and the French chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens. Though his songs were never overtly political, the freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years to give him official recognition.
Jurgis Baltrušaitis was a Lithuanian Symbolist poet and translator, who wrote his works in Lithuanian and Russian. In addition to his important contributions to Lithuanian literature, he was noted as a political activist and diplomat. Himself one of the foremost exponents of iconology, he was the father of art historian and critic Jurgis Baltrušaitis Jr.
Yunna Petrovna Morits (Moritz), is a Soviet and Russian poet, poetry translator and activist. She was a recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Prize For Writer's Civic Courage.
Silver Age is a term traditionally applied by Russian philologists to the last decade of the 19th century and first two or three decades of the 20th century. It was an exceptionally creative period in the history of Russian poetry, on par with the Golden Age a century earlier. The term Silver Age was first suggested by philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, but it only became customary to refer thus to this era in literature in the 1960s. In the Western world other terms, including Fin de siècle and Belle Époque, are somewhat more popular. In contrast to the Golden Age, female poets and writers influenced the movement considerably, and the Silver Age is considered to be the beginning of the formal academic and social acceptance of women writers into the Russian literary sphere.
Paolo Iashvili 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.
Galaktion Tabidze, simply referred to as Galaktioni ,(November 17, 1892 – March 17, 1959), was a Georgian poet of the twentieth century whose writings profoundly influenced all subsequent generations of Georgian poets. He survived Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, which claimed the lives of many of his fellow writers, friends and relatives, but came under heavy pressure from the Soviet authorities. Those years plunged him into depression and alcoholism. He was placed in a psychiatric hospital in Tbilisi, where he committed suicide.
Kolau Nadiradze was a Georgian poet and the last representative of Georgian Symbolist school.
Tsisperqantselebi was a group of Georgian Symbolist poets and prose-writers which dominated the Georgian literature in the 1920s. It was founded as a coterie of young talented writers in the Kutaisi city in 1915 and was suppressed under the Soviet rule early in the 1930s.
Simon Chikovani was a Georgian poet who set out to be the leader of Georgian Futurist movement and ended up as a Soviet establishment figure.
Giorgi Leonidze was a Georgian poet, prose writer, and literary scholar.
Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya was a Soviet poet and writer. She was friend and lover of Nobel Prize-winning writer Boris Pasternak during the last 13 years of his life and the inspiration for the character of Lara in his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957).
Giorgi Leonidze State Museum of Literature, Georgia was founded in 1930 upon the initiative of David Arsenishvili, a legendary museum-founder, who also was the creator of Tbilisi Theater Museum, and later the famous Andrej Rublow museum in Moscow.
Before he became a Bolshevik revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was a promising poet.
Alexey Alexandrovich Surkov was a Russian Soviet poet, editor, literary critic and high-profile nomenklatura figure, the head of the Soviet Union of Writers in 1953–1959, notorious for his role in the persecution of Boris Pasternak
Inner emigration is a concept of an individual or social group who feels a sense of alienation from their country, its government, and its culture. This can be due to the inner emigrants dissent from a radical political or cultural change, or due to their belief in an ideology that they see as more important than loyalty to their nation or country.
The Galaktion and Titsian Tabidze House Museum is a museum in the town of Chkvishi of Vani district in Georgia, and was opened in 1983.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer, translator, and Professor of Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her academic interests are the Caucasus, Comparative Literature, Islam, Islamic Law, Islamic Studies, Persian literature, Poetics and Poetry. Gould received her BA in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. After working in publishing for a few years, Gould moved to Tbilisi, Georgia in 2004, where she learned Georgian and started to learn Persian. Having lived for two years in Tbilisi, she returned to the United States where she started her PhD at Columbia University's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Department for Middle East, South Asian, & African Studies. Her PhD dissertation focused on Persian prison poetry, and was published in revised form as The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination . Her articles have received awards from the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship, and the British Association for American Studies’ Arthur Miller Centre Essay Prize. Gould's work also deals with legal theory and the theory of racism, and she has become an influential critic of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Working Definition of Antisemitism.
