Digressions in a Library

My Ascent

You don't visit me anymore
You say you live far away, that this hill tires you.
You lie like a court jester¹ 1 In My Ascent, Ioseb Grishashvili refers to Sadegh, a Georgian court jester serving Agha Mohammad Khan. According to historical sources, Sadegh was one of three assassins who cut the throat of Mohammad Khan upon his arrival in the city of Shusha during his 1797 attempt to integrate Georgia into the Iranian Empire.
And won’t pay tribute to our love.
…
When you loved me, we worshipped the
Shiraz rose of our lips;
And this hill seemed a valley,
When you loved me… when you loved me…
– Ioseb Grishashvili

Ioseb Grishashvili dedicated the poem My Ascent² 2 My Scent was translated from Georgian into English by Coco Ferguson in collaboration with Nina Akhvlediani to a female poet Nino Tarishvili, for whom the climb to his house seemed effortless until her love slowly faded. Grishashvili lived almost at the top of the Kharpukh district of Tbilisi. In this old neighbourhood, where the poet and his sister lived until 1940, now stands a museum dedicated to Grishashvili, home to a unique library.

The library-museum is difficult to access, perched high on a hill. The steep climb, coupled with the museum's remote location and modest appearance, might have contributed to protecting its collection from Soviet censorship, unlike many other state museums and libraries. The Grishashvili library-museum houses books and materials that cannot be found elsewhere in Georgian public collections.

When you ascend the hill, it's hard to imagine a museum in such a remote location. The two-storey house at the top looks like a simple private residence, modest and without architectural ornamentation. The museum cannot be accessed without a prior appointment to ensure that the residents, Grishashvili's family, are present. An old man, Ioseb Grishashvili's nephew Nodar Grigorashvili, often opens the door in slippers and leads you up a flight of stairs covered with a dusty carpet. He grew up watching the museum being built, the collection assembled and the library catalogued. He has dedicated his life to caring for the collection, a responsibility passed down from his mother, the museum's first director. Grigorashvili is the only person who can guide you through the collection and navigate the paper card system still in use.

The library has two sections: one open to the public and another that remains off-limits, housing rare publications with the oldest publications dating back to the 17th century. Grigorashvili sometimes allows trusted researchers into this restricted area, revealing shelves of over 70,000 books, printed matter, photographs, musical instruments, manuscripts, and sound recordings in multiple languages.

Ioseb Grishashvili was a multifaceted figure—poet, actor, researcher, translator, journalist, editor, publisher, bibliographer and collector. His collection includes materials related to the history, ethnography, culture, languages and politics of the Caucasus, Eastern Turkey, Iran, and Southern Russia.

Born in 1889 in Kharpukh, Tbilisi, Grishashvili (Mamulashvili)³ 3 Grishashvili was Ioseb Mamulashvili’s pseudonym. Many of his poems and letters were published under pseudonyms, cryptonyms, initials, various surnames and sometimes unsigned. was the son of a Georgian father, a ‘charachogheli’ (guild craftsman), who transitioned from the wine trade to running a local tavern. His father, though illiterate, was bright and witty, owning multiple properties and creating his own alphabet to keep track of his business. Grishashvili’s mother was Armenian, and after his father’s death and failed attempts by his mother to apprentice him to local craftsmen, he fell in love with Avlabari theatre and  started a theatre troupe which performed in Kharpukh. He worked as an actor, Armenian to Georgian translator and playwright before becoming a theatre prompter, and starting to write poetry.

As part of the theatre troupe, Grishashvili learned to recite a great deal of Georgian poetry and spent five years in the theatre pit reading authors like Shakespeare, Schiller, Molière, Hugo, Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov and others. When his mother remarried and moved away, the theatre became both home and university for Grishashvili’s rhythmic love poetry that drew on Tbilisi’s performative poetic tradition, Armenian bards, Persian coffee house culture and European literary allusions.

His first public appearance as a poet was in 1910 at an evening hosted by Grigol Robakidze. Grishashvili became the star of the show, eclipsing, in his own words, even established poets like Vazha-Pshavela. His early poetry, inspired by the married women of Kharpukh, caused controversy, leading to the removal of his first collection from publication. Grishashvili noted how every time he bought cheese, sugar or fruit in local shops, they would be wrapped in copies of his poems. He described this incident as the birth of his hatred of all ‘fake social democrats’, and he traced his lifelong ‘non-partisanship’ back to this incident.

From 1907 onwards, Grishashvili collaborated with Georgian magazines and newspapers, often publishing anonymously or under different pseudonyms. He regularly published lyrical, political and social poems, humour, impromptu pieces, riddles, theatre reviews, literary and critical letters, polemical articles, bibliographical reviews, comedic plays and prosaic works. He also dedicated much of his time to editing books written by other authors.

At the peak of his fame, he launched the magazine Leila in 1917, inspired by the Arabian lovers Leyli and Majnun. The magazine featured contributions from prominent Georgian writers, including Grishashvili's contemporaries from the Blue Horns group and became a platform for his suspicion of both Europe and Russia and the threat they posed to ‘Old Tbilisi’ culture. He invited Grigol Robakidze to write the introduction for the first edition of Leila. That text is modest and uncomfortable in the way it extols Georgia’s place as the crossroads of East and West. Grishashvili’s poem Queen of Persia is the first to feature, in which he imagines himself as the King of Poetry. . Other Blue Horns line up alongside Robakidze in Leila’s first edition, including Paolo Iashvili and Valerian Gaprindashvili. At this point the Blue Horns had been formed for around a year and were still in Kutaisi. The orientalist thrust of Leila seems bizarre now—a strange moment in Georgia’s literary history, and one that the Blue Horns distanced themselves from speedily. Within a year of Leila’s publication, relations broke down as the new modern verse published by the Blue Horns looked west to the Symbolists and Futurists. It was a battle, waged in the pages of literary magazines, that the Blue Horns won, and Grishashvili withdrew to his library.

The Sovietisation of Georgia in 1921 had a profound impact on the country's cultural history. Poets had to rewrite their biographies, omitting works that were unacceptable to Soviet authorities. Many of these works are only now being rediscovered, reprinted and translated. In one of three official versions of Grishashvili's autobiography, dated 1957, he states that his most interesting period began after the establishment of the Soviet regime. Many editions of his poems and new works were published, and his patriotic poems were set to music during World War II. In 1947, he was elected an academician of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. He received the Stalin Prize in 1949 for his literary contributions.

Grishashvili’s nephew reveals his dual identity, referring to his unprinted poems, kept hidden in the library-museum⁴ 4 Ioseb Grishashvili's handwritten notebook, from which Unprintable Poems' was published, has the following preface: ‘This notebook, the existence of which no one but me knows, should be buried in my archive. May history forgive me for my poetry! I am sincere. I.GR. 1941 July 3’ Archive courtesy of the Ioseb Grishashvili Library-Museum. . Fifty of these poems were printed for the first time in 1992, with 40 included in the collection 100 Poems⁵ 5 100 Poems, Ioseb Grishashvili. Published by Intelecti, Tbilisi, 2009 .⁵ 5 100 Poems, Ioseb Grishashvili. Published by Intelecti, Tbilisi, 2009 These works, created against the Soviet government, were never meant for public eyes. Interestingly, Grishashvili’s second, undated autobiography reflects his disdain for duplicity and hypocrisy.

Researching Georgian literary heritage, especially around the time of Sovietisation, is challenging due to these dualities. How can we relate to a history that officially never existed? How can local narratives, archival objects, and biographies be made legible today?⁷ 7 Similar questions were posited at ‘The Whole Life Academy Berlin’ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, 2021-2022, where the participants of the workshop programme rehearsed collaborative forms of knowledge production in archives, taking up urgent questions on decolonising archives and objects and unfolding marginalised narratives.

Collections from Georgian public funds are rarely on view, and the issue of accessibility is a particular one. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, fires in museum collections across Georgia were common, adding to the ambiguity surrounding them. Recently, there was a theft of unique publications related to Russian Zaum poets from the Grishashvili library. This prompts a deep mistrust for anyone who wants to research, let alone borrow the artefacts for exhibition purposes, even if one manages to navigate the dense bureaucratic procedures intended to control the movement of materials in and out of public collections.

Grishashvili’s library collection offers a unique glimpse into Georgian literary history, particularly the period before and after Sovietisation. During an inventory, books by suppressed authors were found with their title pages folded or names removed, some having been hidden underground in the garden for years. Grishashvili was the first head of the library-museum and played a crucial role in preserving the works of repressed authors. His niece, Ani Tsitsishvili continued his work, overseeing the research, classification, and cataloguing of the library's vast collection.

The museum's design reflects its historical and cultural significance. In 1969, prior to the museum’s public opening, architect Temur Tkhilava designed the wooden displays, which echo the wooden joinery of Georgian vernacular architecture. Artist Avto Varazi was responsible for colour selection and the design of the vertical display panels hung throughout the museum's two main rooms. Interestingly, a specialist, Simon Bolkvadze, was assigned to install the books placing them on top of one another with transparent plastic pins directly inserted into the vertical panels. Alexander (Lali) Javakhishvili, an art historian and archaeologist, carefully curated the ethnographic objects. Javakhishvili, who had been responsible for exhibition designs at the Georgian National Museum, initiated collaborations between architects, archaeologists and artists. Despite his background and long tenure at the National Museum, the conservation of the artefacts on display did not seem to be a priority at the Grishashvili museum. Before the museum’s refurbishment in 2010, certain materials, such as posters and ephemera, were only partially covered with transparent protective glass. We can speculate that these weren’t fully covered to allow visitors to examine them more closely, engaging with their materiality and texture.

In the exhibition display, the title, cover design, and curvaceous Georgian lettering of Leila instantly attract the visitor's attention. Bolkvadze had layered the three editions of Leila, positioned one on top of the other. This approach to positioning the books as objects can be observed in recent artistic and curatorial practices, with exhibitions of books often using a similar methodology. The Canadian Centre for Architecture, for example, exhibited Gordon Matta-Clark's library collection by placing the books in transparent, lightweight boxes, turning them into objects that could be arranged and rearranged on metal shelves within the exhibition context⁸ 8 Out of the Box: Gordon Matta-Clark: Readings of the archive by Yann Chateigné, Hila Peleg, and Kitty Scott Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2019-2020. .

However, this might not suffice if one wants to research and engage more thoroughly with the library collections, adding bibliographic descriptions that offer a better sense of the books' physicality (especially when conservation precautions limit full access to fragile books and publications), and could set a new and at points more poetic context for studying a library collection. It is possible, also, that the very skills of the collector as editor, typesetter and printer could offer insights into the library's archives. His meticulous attention to detail urges us to describe the books’ physical forms.

In 2022, New York-based curator Marina Caron visited the Grishashvili museum and closely examined the selection of literary publications. Caron noted the use of the typeface Vienna throughout, designed by Mikheil Kipiani in 1865. The publications also feature hand-drawn cover text and variations of the typeface Viennese Mtavruli for titles. 

Caron wrote a bibliographic description for the first edition of Leila⁹ 9 Leila, N1 1917; Authors: G.Kikodze, A.Chumbadze, A.Abasheli, I.Elephteridze, K. Makashvili, P.Iashvili, G.Robakidze, I.Grishashvili, L. Kiacheli, G. Gvazava, N. Lortkipanidze, Marijan, S. Dadiani, M. Bochorishvili, A. Papava; Dimensions: 29.7 × 21 cm; Archive of the  I.Grishashvili Library-Museum. :

The collector's voice must also be present in the research process, especially since Grishashvili loved reciting poetry aloud and made recordings of his readings, which are easily accessible online. He often collected two, sometimes three copies of the same book, using one for personal annotations. He always used a red pencil, and his handwriting can be found throughout countless publications in his collection. Sometimes these annotations were made for literary research; at other times, they reveal the collector’s deep knowledge of his peers' poetry and prose, documenting his personal relationships through these notes—relationships that can be deciphered and read between the lines.

These painstakingly-studied annotations have been archived and are included in the library catalogue, with each book's library entry number followed by the annotations. This is an unusual method of inventorying a collection, let alone positioning the annotations in the catalogue. One such example is Grishashvili's annotations concerning a female poet Mariam (Marijan) Tkemaladze, who had been his sometime lover, lifelong friend and at times a collaborator on book translations. In his autobiography, Grishashvili writes about his relationships with women and frequently repeats themes that appear throughout his poetry. Marijan, however, was the only female poet invited to contribute to Leila, which is another reason to delve into Grishashvili’s writings about her.

If you remove the inventory numbers and descriptions of archival artefacts, you are left with 193 mentions of Marijan in the annotations. Most often, these notes identify word pairings in other poets' works and mention that they have been plagiarised from Marijan's poetry. Grishashvili seemed to have collected everything Marijan ever published and appeared to know her poetry by heart, even collecting her work after she stopped writing poetry, shifting to children's literature.

One noteworthy example from Grishashvili’s annotations related to Marijan’s writing is the phrase „პოემა-იპოება“ (‘Poema – Ipoeba’ – means a poem can be found), with a certain wordplay ‘Ipoeba – Ipoba’ could refer to finding something or slicing it in the middle. Grishashvili came across this phrase in a book entitled Bayron, by Child Harrold and translated by Silovan Kundadze (Kutaisi, 1925). He underlined the words and noted that the pairing was good, and that Marijan had also used it in her writing. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault describes a similar, resonating effect: ‘The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences.’ Connecting poetry, linking words, identifying writing similarly used by various writers was Grishashvili’s common practice and at points his editorial suggestions ‘sliced’ words with his uncompromising red pencil.

When researching the biographies of poets from just before and after the Sovietisation of Georgia, Grishashvili’s annotations reveal much more than the official and unofficial autobiographies these poets had written. The duality of these poets fades away, leaving layers of writing and echoes that can be fictionalised or engaged with, much like the poetry they reference. Grishashvili’s voice punctuates the texts, appearing in fragments, like echoes, and it is via an echo that meaning becomes more resonant¹⁰ 10 A similar wording was used by Stephanie Serra when describing her essay as a digression into her personal library in Through the Words of Others, volume 7 of the series fink twice, Published by edition fink, Contemporary Art Publishers, Zurich, 2018 . A parallel can perhaps be found in the writings of Roland Barthes. In the opening pages of Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), he introduces the notion of ‘biographemes’—’a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections’ of life that survive oblivion, dispersing into posterity only to touch some future body, destined to the same dispersion’. Grishashvili’s annotations can be perceived as complementary to his vast archive, and with partial attempts, minor inflections, fragments and poetic interpretations, the research of his library continues to this day. 

With biographical research by Coco Ferguson.