Extract

The writings of the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) and of the Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze (1895–1937) in the 1910s and 1920s were influenced by the dominant modernist cultural tendencies – high modernism and avant-gardism. In their poetic works they dealt with the most sensitive problems of the modernist era – religious crisis, spiritual search, the refusal and, on the other hand, the striving for Christian belief, the quest for individual answers to existential questions. For both poets, the first period of their poetic activity was related with modernism, and by the 1930s both had to reshape their style and change their cultural choice under Soviet pressure. Right at this crossroad their ways intersected, their personal friendship started. In critical moments this connection became for both a ground for some moral, as well as cultural balance.

Titsian Tabidze

In the early twentieth century a new generation of Georgian writers started to seek aesthetic and philosophical support within European modernism. The elder group, the generation of the 1860s, under the leadership of Ilia Chavchavadze, laid the foundations for a modern Georgian national identity, and also consolidated realism as a dominant cultural style in Georgian literature. The new generation was opposed to realism, although they inherited the commitment to the ideas of the nation’s independence and statehood, as well as an interest for Western cultural and social values. Titsian Tabidze was one of the leaders of the Symbolist literary group of the “Blue Horns...