Early in the 1920s, Iashvili, "brilliant, polished, cultural, an amusing talker, European and good-looking" as described by his close friend and translator Boris Pasternak,[1] emerged as a leader of Georgian post-Symbolist and experimental poetry.

[2] The contamination of former Symbolists by socialist dogma was a painful process, but Iashvili had finally to adapt to the Soviet doctrines, for his poetry becoming more and more ideological in essence.

At the height of the 1930s Great Purges, he made desperate attempts to extricate himself by confessing his "errors in judgment" and reiterating his devotion to Stalin and Beria.

Presented by Beria with the alternative of denouncing his lifelong friend and fellow Symbolist poet Titsian Tabidze, or being arrested and tortured by the NKVD, Iashvili went to the Writers' Union office and shot himself dead on 22 July 1937.

[3] The Union’s session went on to pass a resolution stating that Iashvili posed as a litterateur while engaging in treason and espionage, and maintaining that his suicide during the course of their meeting was "a provocative act that arouses loathing and indignation in every decent gathering of Soviet writers.