Background
CHIKOVANI, Simon was born on January 9, 1903 in village Naycsakao, now Geo Soviet Socialist Republic.
CHIKOVANI, Simon was born on January 9, 1903 in village Naycsakao, now Geo Soviet Socialist Republic.
Born near the town Abasha, he was educated at the Kutaisi Realschule and Tbilisi State University from which he graduated in 1922.
As a teenager, he was associated with the Blue Horns, a group of young Georgian Symbolists. Although he stood far from any “proletarian” thematic, he joined the nascent "Left" poets and became their spokesman. In 1924, was arrested and nearly shot on a walking-tour to Kakheti during the Red Terror that followed the Georgian rebellion against the Soviet rule.
Between 1924 and 1929, he produced two series of poems (ფიქრები მტკვრის პირას, 1925.
მხოლოდ ლექსები, 1930) that earned him a reputation of one of the most original Georgian poets of the 20th century. In the words of modern British scholar David Rayfield, "most are energetic and provocative Whitmanesque heckling and satirizing of the older generation of poets: Chikovani sported Mayakovsky’s mantle." Since 1924, he edited the notorious Futurist journal H28O4 and directed his attacks against his former associates from the Blue Horns group, chiefly Titsian Tabidze and Paolo Iashvili.
He served as a secretary of the Georgian Union of Writers from 1930 to 1932, its president from 1944 to 1951, and deputy to the Supreme Soviet from 1950 to 1954.
Presidium member, Geo Writers’ Union. Board member, Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics Writers’ Union from 1959. Communist Party member from 1941.