Essay
With Blue Drinking Horns
ცისფერი ყანწებით
Titsian Tabidze · 1916
Synopsis
The inaugural text of the Blue Horns review. It holds that the new art was born of the city, that the artist's bond with nature is broken, and that the poet's consciousness, crushed by the grey city of iron, has poured out in an unknown song. It reproaches Georgian letters for confusing the symbol with allegory, and asks them to reconnect with the West.
Context
The text appears at the head of the first issue of the journal that the group launched in 1916, a year after its formation in Kutaisi around Grigol Robakidze, to whom it attributes the country's first Symbolist verse. It gives the movement its doctrine: to restore the broken link between Georgian letters and the West, to take up again the question of national identity, to regard the capital as a centre of art on a par with the great European cities. In the same gesture it breaks with the imitation of the Georgian classics, a position to which the group would later return. An English translation appeared in 2014, accompanied by a study, in an American university journal devoted to modernism.
Who it is for
About twenty pages of prose of ideas, with no French edition. It is worth knowing that Georgia in 1916 still belonged to the Russian Empire, and that its letters were regarded there as provincial.
Prizes and reception
The doctrinal text of Georgian symbolism: histories of literature date the arrival of modernism in Georgia from it.