Valerian Gaprindashvili

Returning to Georgia, Gaprindashvili was one of the founder members of the Symbolist group Blue Horns 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, 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, as well as the mannerisms of the Russian Symbolists.

Gaprindashvili also made translations from Eugène Edine Pottier, Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, Alexander Blok, Nikolay Nekrasov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others.

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