By REBECCA GOULD [Guernica] – At the top of the stairwell, I knock; the woman who opens the door has a question in her eyes. Who am I? Has she forgotten she lives in a museum? It turns out they have not had a visitor for years. As museums go, Titsian Tabidze Museum is unconventional in that it is the private residence of Titsian’s descendants, home of his daughter Nitka, now eighty-four, and his granddaughter, Nina (named after his late wife). The Titsian Tabidze Museum is more shrine to this legacy than institution.

Nitka and Nina sit across from me at a large mahogany table in the center of the room. Despite three decades that divide them, the resemblance between mother and daughter is striking, and the fact that they are both wearing blue silk only heightens it. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Tbilisi was a cultural capital, and Titsian’s home was its epicenter. Luminaries flocked from all over the world to pay their homage to the poets of Tbilisi’s avant-garde. This was the table, Nina explains, behind which Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak sat with their wives when they came for visits. Almost every major Georgian and Russian of the twentieth century has sat at this table, Nina announces, proud of her grandfather’s literary connections.

Continued at Guernica | More Chronicle & Notices.