On this date in 1937, the Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze was executed in Stalin’s purges.

“Titsiani”, who co-founded the “Blue Horns” symbolist circle in 1916, is the addressee of fellow dissident litterateur Boris Pasternak’s Letters to a Georgian Friend.

“There is as much soul in his poetry as there was in him, a reserved and complicated soul, wholly attracted to the good and capable of clairvoyance and self-sacrifice,” Pasternak would remember of his comrade. “The memory of Tabidze puts me in mind of the country; landscapes rise in my imagination, the waves of the sea and a vast flowering plain; clouds drifting in a row and, behind them in the distance, mountains rising to the same level.”

The problem was their decidedly less sentimental countryman in the Kremlin.

Georgian security chief Lavrenty Beria put the screws to the Georgian writers’ association, driving fellow Blue Horns alum Paolo Yashvili to suicide when he was pressured to denounce Tabidze.

But of course the only difference that made was for Yashvili’s soul.

Arrested as a traitor a bare two months before his death, Tabidze defiantly betrayed to his interrogators the name of only a single fellow-traveler: 18th century Georgian poet Besiki.

On this day..

• 1709: Thomas Smith, Aaron Jones, Joseph Wells, and John Long
• 2010: John David Duty, the first pentobarbital execution in the U.S.
• 1859: Four of John Brown's Raiders
• 1946: Sulaiman Murshid, Alawite prophet
• 1897: John Morgan, the last public hanging in West Virginia
• 1794: Jean-Baptiste Carrier, of the Noyades de Nantes
• 1678: Stephen Arrowsmith
• Themed Set: Tyburn on the cusp of the Bloody Code
• 1949: Traycho Kostov, Bulgarian purgee
• 1952: Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan, of the Boyd Gang
• 1520: Hemming Gadh
• 1943: Elfriede Scholz, Erich Maria Remarque's sister
• 1594: Alison Balfour