Marijan - Lika Tarkhan - Mouravi

Who can say what lies ahead, which of us will remain,

Who will be the one to take this picture from the wall.

Death will come and begin its selection;

Tonight our existence will be handed its date.1

This year marks the 100 year centenary of the publication of Marijan’s debut collection of poems. First printed in 1921, this slim volume brought Marijan’s remarkable poems to the public eye. In the century that followed, Marijan’s works for both children and adults experienced a number of further publications, but her exceptionally bold verses from the 1920’s began to gradually disappear from sight.

In 1925, the Georgian female writers’ arts and literature almanac published Marijan’s writings under the title, From the Notebook: Chance Subjects (excerpt featured below). As an individual whose freedom was stifled by the restrictions of a patriarchal system, the heartbreak that Marijan feels for her epoch is laid bare in this text. I attribute this sorrow, which is often apparent in her early works, to the pervasion of an unnatural silence; a silence that gradually erased Marijan’s place in the radical poetry canon. In her poem, Testament, she writes:

When I’m to die, to rot and turn to blessed corpse

Do not grant me a place in hallowed earth, do not bury me among the others!

It grates on me to lie between the dead, mute, singing voicelessly… 2

For precisely those reasons, this edition of Danarti invites readers to reconsider Marijan’s neglected works. For the first time, her poem You Haven’t Been The First Beloved from the collection, Sea Saga, has been printed. I first discovered Sea Saga, which is dated to 1926, in the archives of Tbilisi Literature Museum. I was unable to find this collection published elsewhere in full, and the poem that left the greatest impression on me was not disclosed in any other publication. Chancing upon this buried poem from Marijan’s body of work left me with an unsettled feeling of emptiness. In writer Ioseb Grishashvili’s home museum, where the writer’s original study room is kept intact, Marijan’s photographic portrait remains on the wall to this today. The photograph hangs in an unusually large frame; between frame and portrait, there lies a wide, white border. The empty space of this border evokes our own understanding of Marijan’s artistry, a poet of whom we only have a vague impression.

Marijan was the pseudonym of Mariam Tkemaladze. Today, Mariam is known almost exclusively as an early pioneer of Georgian children’s literature. This comes in spite of the fact that Marijan’s early poetry is strong, sensuous, and distinctly honest. Marijan wrote plays, short stories, and critical essays. If we rely on her verses, however, they reveal poetry to be the form in which she expressed herself most truly, openly committing her personal feelings to the page. She attributes the origin of this expressive impulse to her suffering beneath a perpetual knot of nerves, which went hand-in-hand with the experience of womanhood, more than she does to poetry in and of itself.

Despite the fact that Marijan’s writings from the 20’s were printed by numerous Georgian literary journals, she was not confident in identifying herself as a poet. When she was invited to attend a summer writers’ conference, she turned down the offer: “I consider myself neither a thinker nor a writer. I am, only and ever, a woman!” So wrote one of the 20th century’s most significant poets.

Today it is difficult to trace how the author of these modern and original poems came to be labelled primarily as a children’s writer. The Georgian Soviet Encyclopaedia states that Marijan’s creative path was determined by the children’s poem Nelly in the Circus (1926): ‘following that, she primarily worked in children’s writing.’ This imprecise entry in the Soviet Encyclopaedia presents an overt example of the ways in which Marijan’s poeticism was discredited.

The forthrightness of Marijan’s poetry was challenged in different ways at the time by her friends, members of the Writer’s Union, and Soviet Institutions. Marijan wrote poetry until the end of her life. Her personal style of expression did, however, change considerably as she aged, as though she had given in to the prevailing mood against her. In her letters and poems to Ekaterine Gabashvili, Marijan’s self-deprecation is evident.

you allured me. Single bead dropped from your eyes

and… you disapproved the honesty of my rhyme…

[…]

I bent my head. agreed to the high intellect.

Felt the truth of every word of yours,3

Mechanisms of discreditation at that time were widespread, and experienced by many. Marijan’s poems came to be attributed to male authors: we learn from her letters to Ioseb Grishashvili’s that for the majority of her poems, he was given false credit. ‘They tell me to my face that Grishashvili writes my poems,’ Marijan noted to him with anger.

Even Grishashvili, with whom Marijan was very close, considered the female poet’s works to be excessively open and personal. In a confidential letter in Grishashvili’s house museum, Marijan writes, ‘you yourself were criticizing me, saying you are a married woman, that you have children…oh, how I hate all those labels that are dredged up in public view!’ ‘You possess a practical talent,’ the famous writer would often repeat to a young Marijan, and with those words he would inflict his most painful critique on her.

Several years ago, when Marijan’s autobiography was printed anew, the naming of her 1926 collection Sea Saga was unwittingly changed to “Zviada”. If it weren’t for the preserved handwritten notes in the Georgian Literature Museum, we would never have found these exceptional poems from one of the 20th century’s most impassioned poets. For these and many other reasons, the voice of Marijan is rarely heard today. The Soviet past has only fragmentarily preserved her history. “I am dying alive. [...] If only someone else builds a palace on the ruins of my heart, otherwise I am not capable of doing anything”, wrote Marijan back in 1925.

***

This edition of Danarti is devoted to Marijan, and to what her case represents for all such artists who have vanished from history. In light of this publication’s format, we are not proposing an evaluation of Marijan’s total body of work, but rather a commentary, a creative assessment, and a range of thought-provoking artworks inspired by her craft. For the first time, we are printing Marijan’s 1926 poem You Haven’t Been the First Beloved, and an assortment of her lesser known and forgotten poems. We are including an excerpt from Marijan’s work, From the Notebook: Chance Subjects, which was first printed in the Georgian women’s art and literature almanac’s 2nd edition (1926). We are also sharing an interview with Tamta Melashvili, a writer and researcher of Marijan, whose Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry has only recently seen publication, and which has played an important role in Georgian literature with its openness and creative form of expression. For this edition, Ana Chiladze has contributed artworks which respond to the human perception of wholeness, a journey of transformation and the necessity for rebirth. These realised works are a manifestation of this journey, in which visible, places matter into the soul, and incarnates the soul.’
Nino Dzandzava has also created cyanotypes to accompany Marijan’s correspondences. This technique, an early forerunner to photography, creates a reflection of the subject by exposing chemical compounds to sunlight. The image of the objects obtained in this process changes the purpose of the object and explores different ways of working with archival conservation. The cyanotypes, which consist of a combination of quotes from Marijan’s correspondence, form a subjective compilation of the archive. One the one hand, they reveal the hidden and unexposed original text, and on the other hand comply with Marijan’s wish to eliminate her story from another person’s (his)tory. Architect Rusudan Tkemaladze has drawn on a televised program to construct an architectural plan of Marijan’s summer home — the slow deterioration of which, without any excess symbolism, forms a direct commentary on the forgotten nature of the creator. What is left of history, and who preserves it? These sketches developed from media create new myths and lead us to consider the justice and truth of history anew. For this bilingual edition of Danarti, Ana Gzirishvili has translated Marijan’s poems into English and reimagined her poetry anew. In parallel, Anna R. Japaridze has wonderfully (editor’s note) translated this introductory text and excerpts from Marijan’s diary entries, through which we have gained wider access to Marijan’s original, private voice.

1. Marijan, Inscription on the Picture, 1921.

2. Marijan, My will, 1921.

3. Marijan, To Ekaterine Gabashvili, 1948, Translated by Ana Gzirishvili.

                                                                                                                                                  *Front facade, 2021, Rusudan Tkemaladze, ink on paper, 21x29