Tsisperqantselebi was a group of Georgian

Georgia (country)

Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...

 Symbolist

Symbolism (arts)

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

 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

Kutaisi

Kutaisi is Georgia's second largest city and the capital of the western region of Imereti. It is 221 km to the west of Tbilisi.-Geography:...

 city in 1915 and was suppressed under the Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 rule early in the 1930s.

The group originated in Kutaisi, western Georgia (then part of Imperial Russia), then a centre of Georgian avant-garde thought. Its members were the group’s founder and mentor Grigol Robakidze

Grigol Robakidze

Grigol Robakidze was a Georgian writer, publicist, and public figure primarily known for his exotic prose and anti-Soviet émigré activities....

, Titsian Tabidze

Titsian Tabidze

Titsian Tabidze was a Georgian poet and one of the leaders of Georgian symbolist movement. He fell victim to Stalin’s Great Purge, being arrested and executed on trumped-up charges of treason. Tabidze was a close friend of the well-known Russian writer Boris Pasternak who translated his poetry...

, Paolo Iashvili

Paolo Iashvili

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 Stalin’s Great Purge heavily affected Iashvili who committed suicide at the Writers’ Union of Georgia.Born near...

, Valerian Gaprindashvili

Valerian Gaprindashvili

Valerian Gaprindashvili was a Georgian poet and translator whose early, Symbolist, poetry was of much influence on development of Georgian metaphor and verse....

, Kolau Nadiradze

Kolau Nadiradze

Kolau Nadiradze was a Georgian poet and the last representative of Georgian Symbolist school.Born and initially educated at Kutaisi, Georgia , he studied law at the University of Moscow from 1912 to 1916. Returning to Georgia, his first verses appeared in 1916 in Georgian symbolist journal...

, Shalva Apkhaidze, Nikolo Mitsishvili, Razhden Gvetadze, Levan Meunargia, Ali Arsenishvili, Sandro Tsirekidze

Sandro Tsirekidze

Sandro Tsirekidze was a Georgian poet, Symbolist.Born in Kutaisi, he graduated from the school course in 1912 and then continued his studies at St. Petersburg University. Because of health problems he moved to Kiev University...

, Giorgi Leonidze

Giorgi Leonidze

Giorgi Leonidze was a Georgian poet, prose writer, and literary scholar.Leonidze was born in the village of Patardzeuli in the eastern Georgian province of Kakheti. He graduated from the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in 1918 and continued his studies at the Tbilisi State University...

, Sergo Kldiashvili

Sergo Kldiashvili

Sergo Kldiashvili was a Georgian prose-writer who set out to be Symbolist but then was drawn to conformist Realist prose under Soviet rule....

 and Shalva Karmeli (Gogiashvili). Georgia’s greatest 20th-century poet, Galaktion Tabidze

Galaktion Tabidze

Galaktion Tabidze was a leading Georgian poet of the twentieth century whose writings profoundly influenced all subsequent generations of Georgian poets. He survived Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, which claimed lives of many of his fellow writers, friends and relatives, but came under heavy...

 was also affiliated with this group, but he soon left it. The leading Georgian painter of that time Lado Gudiashvili

Lado Gudiashvili

Lado Gudiashvili was a 20th century Georgian painter. Gudiashvili was born in Tiflis on March 18 , 1896 into a family of a railroad employee. He studied in the Tiflis school of sculpture and fine art , and later in Ronson's private academy in Paris...

 was also closely associated with the group and frequently illustrated their publications.

The Blue Horns movement was a reaction against Realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

 and civic modes in Georgian literature. Its début took place under the fashionable banners of Symbolism and Decadence

Decadent movement

The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...

 in 1916 when the literary magazine tsisperi qantsebi ("ცისფერი ყანწები"; The Blue Horns) was first published. The group quickly gained acclaim through their successful efforts to renovate and Westernize

Western world

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...

 Georgian verse. In spite of the Blue Horns’ notorious attacks on the classics of Georgian literature in the group’s early years, their poetry remained nationalist, yet French-oriented. Their radical experimentation thrived in the years of Georgia's independence

Democratic Republic of Georgia

The Democratic Republic of Georgia , 1918–1921, was the first modern establishment of a Republic of Georgia.The DRG was created after the collapse of the Russian Empire that began with the Russian Revolution of 1917...

 between 1918 and 1921. Although the leading "Blue Horns" made half-hearted conformist gestures, the group came under a strong pressure and criticism after the establishment of Soviet regime in Georgia in 1921. They left the Union of Georgian Writers in October 1921 to form an alternative union, but the group was finally dissolved in 1931-2. Many of them reconciled with the Soviet authorities and were praised for having "liberated themselves from decadence" and for their "significant role in the evolution of Georgian Soviet literature". Yet, the fate of the leading "Blue Horns" was tragic: Shalva Karmeli died of tuberculosis at the age of 24 in 1923 and his grave at the Kutaisi Archangel Church was soon razed by the Bolshevik

Bolshevik

The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

s; Titsian Tabidze and Nikolo Mitsishvili were executed and Paolo Iashvili shot himself during the Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

 in 1937; Sergo Kldiashvili and Kolau Nadiradze were saved only by chance: their NKVD

NKVD

The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....

 interrogator was himself arrested and the files mislaid; Grigol Robakidze had earlier defected to Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

escaping the inevitable arrest; the purge of his friends and an obligatory conformism plunged Galaktion into depression and alcoholism, leading to his suicide in 1959.