Mosashvili, Ilo

Mosashvili, Ilo Onisimovich 

Born Jan. 7, 1896, in the village of Chargali, present-day Dusheti Raion, Georgian SSR; died Aug. 4, 1954, in Tbilisi. Georgian Soviet poet and playwright.

Mosashvili studied at the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute (1914) and later at the law faculty of the University of Kharkov. He first appeared in print in 1916. His early poetry is intimate in nature. The successes of socialist construction led Mosashvili to write highly emotional civic poetry, including “The Town in the Forest,” “In Byelorussia,” “Night After the Hunt,” and “Glory to Them!”

In the postwar years, Mosashvili also wrote plays, including The Stationmaster (1947), about the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45; Sunken Stones (1949; State Prize of the USSR, 1951), about the life and struggle of Georgians living in Turkey; and The Road to the Future (1953), about the friendship between the Georgian and Russian peoples. Mosashvili also wrote verse for children, screenplays, short stories, and sketches. He was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and a number of medals.

WORKS

Rch’euli t’xzulebani sam tomad, vols. 1–3. Tbilisi, 1968–72.
Rch’euli t’xzulebani, vols. 1–2. Tbilisi, 1959–61.
Lirika. Tbilisi, 1965.
Lek’sebi. Tbilisi, 1967.
In Russian translation:
Izbrannoe, Tbilisi, 1957.
Stikhi. Tbilisi, 1967.