Valerian Gaprindashvili (December 21, 1888 – January 31, 1941) was a 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...

 poet and translator whose early, 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...

, poetry was of much influence on development of Georgian metaphor and verse.

Born in 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:...

, he graduated from the Moscow University in 1914. Returning to Georgia, Gaprindashvili was one of the founder members of the Symbolist group Blue Horns

Blue Horns

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.The group originated in...

 in 1915/16. His early, innovating poems illustrate the world as a mystic show populated with phantoms and doubles mixed with nearly "sacral" heroes from history and literature such as Cagliostro, Hamlet

Prince Hamlet

Prince Hamlet is a fictional character, the protagonist in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the Prince of Denmark, nephew to the usurping Claudius and son of the previous King of Denmark, Old Hamlet. Throughout the play he struggles with whether, and how, to avenge the murder of his father, and...

, Ophelia, Hannibal, etc. His first and best book, Daisebi ("Sundowns", 1919), at a time he called "the Dionysian night" of Georgia, introduced into Georgian the aesthetics of Baudelaire and Paul Valéry

Paul Valéry

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...

, as well as the mannerism

Mannerism

Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...

s of the Russian Symbolists. Gaprindashvili significantly distanced himself from the Georgian literary classics’ understanding of a poet's mission and suggested an outcast, mad and suicidal person as an eventual result of a poet's natural evolution. From the 1920s, like many of his fellow Symbolists, he faced an ideological pressure from the newly established 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....

 regime which forced him to make a conciliatory move towards the standards of Soviet literature. He survived Stalinist purges

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...

 of the 1930s, but his later years were unproductive.

Gaprindashvili also made translations from Eugène Edine Pottier

Eugène Edine Pottier

Eugène Edme Pottier was a French revolutionary socialist, poet, and transport worker.Pottier was elected a member of the Paris municipal council - the Paris Commune, in March 1871...

, Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...

, Nikolay Nekrasov, Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...

, and others. He also translated and published in Russian the works of the Georgian Romanticist poet Nikoloz Baratashvili

Nikoloz Baratashvili

Nik'oloz Baratashvili was a Georgian poet, one of the first Georgians to marry a modern nationalism with European Romanticism and to introduce "Europeanism" into Georgian literature...

.