search." Arrest and execution On 10 October 1937 Tabidze was expelled from the Union of Georgian Writers and then arrested by the NKVD. He was charged with anti-Soviet agitation and betraying the Motherland. Broken under torture and denial of sleep, Tabidze "confessed" to all the charges. When interrogators demanded to know the names of his co-conspirators, Tabidze, with bitter sarcasm, named only the 18th-century poet Besiki. Within two months he was shot, although no announcement of this was leaked. Legacy Tabidze's arrest and disappearance was a shock to all who knew him. His lifelong friend and fellow symbolist poet, Paolo Iashvili, had already been forced to denounce several of his fellow poets as enemies of the people. But after Tabidze's arrest, Iashvili shot himself with a hunting rifle inside the Writers’ Union in Tbilisi. For almost two decades, however, Tabidze's family and friends believed that he was still alive. In 1940, Boris Pasternak helped Nina Tabidze draft a petition to Lavrenty Beria on her husband's behalf. However, it was not until the mid-1950s, during the Khrushchev thaw, that the truth about Tabidze's fate emerged. Tabidze's poetry has been translated into many languages, including Russian and English. Russian poets Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam translated him into Russian. Rebecca Ruth Gould's translations of Titsian Tabidze into English have appeared in Seizure, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Tin House, Prairie Schooner, and Metamorphoses. Gould also interviewed Titsian Tabidze's daughter Nita in the Tbilisi home Nita shared with her father in 2010. References 1890s births 1937 deaths People from Imereti People from Kutais Governorate Male poets from Georgia (country) Great Purge victims from Georgia (country) People executed for treason against the Soviet Union 20th-century poets from Georgia (country) Links T. Tabidze. A Poem Landslide (audio) (English) T. Tabidze. Okroqana (Golden Field) (audio) (English) T. Tabidze. Slowly Walking To and Fro (audio) (English) Executed writers