Kote Marjanishvili

The enterprise, notable for its ties with the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and the singer Feodor Chaliapin, and for its Georgian-type choreography, was rendered abortive in a year due largely to financial problems.

[2] Marjanishvili’s 1917 production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé was a true triumph and continued to be staged during the tumultuous years of revolution and civil war in Kiev (Kiyv, Ukraine), Moscow, Petrograd (St. Petersburg, Russia), and Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia).

Marjanishvili’s simultaneous experiments with festive staging in Rostov-on-Don (1914-15) and Petrograd (1916-17) led him to coordinate the mass spectacle Toward a Worldwide Commune (co-directed by Nikolai Petrov, Sergei Radlov, Vladimir Solovyov and Adrian Piotrovsky, 1920).

The two men collaborated with respect and unease, but Akhemeteli’s nearly despotic rule over his artistic corporation "Duruji" proved too violent for Marjanishvili whose production had become more restrained, motivated by his own conviction that "there’s enough suffering in life without showing it on the stage.

He died of illness in Moscow on 17 April 1933 before the worsening political climate led to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge which would take the life of Marjanishvili’s erstwhile collaborator and rival Sandro Akhemeteli in 1937.