[Portrait of Lavrenti Beria intact] Sabchota Khelovneba (Soviet Art), No. 1-2. Journal of literary and art scholarship, 1936. In Georgian.

საბჭოთა ხელოვნება : ხელოვნებისა და ლიტერატურის მცოდნეობის ჟურნალი / საქართველოს სსრ სახკომსაბჭოსთან არსებული ხელოვნების საქმეთა სამმართველოს ორგანო ; პასუხისმგებელი რედაქტორი ალექსანდრე დუდუჩავა.
№ 1-2, 1936 წელი.
თბილისი : სტამბა „ტექნიკა და შრომა", 1936. 96 გვერდი ; 29 სმ. ტირაჟი 2 200 ც. 
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Sabchota Khelovneba (Soviet Art) : a journal of literary and art scholarship / organ of the Directorate of Arts Affairs under the Council of People's Commissars of the Georgian SSR ; responsible editor Aleksandre Duduchava.
No. 1-2, 1936.
Tbilisi : "Tekhnika da Shroma" Press, 1936. 96 pp., illustrated ; 29 cm.
Original illustrated paper wrappers. Print run of 2,200 copies.
Wrappers good: general edge wear throughout. Text block good: leaves age-toned, complete and legible throughout; all plates and illustrations present and well preserved.

A striking survival of Soviet Georgian cultural periodical literature from the depths of the high Stalinist 1930s. "Sabchota Khelovneba" ("Soviet Art") ran continuously in Tbilisi from 1921, covering theatre, music, painting, cinema, architecture, and choreography, with contributions from the leading art historians, theatre critics, and writers of Soviet Georgia; publication was suspended during the war years (1941-1953) and later resumed under a different editorial mandate. The present double issue, No. 1-2 of 1936, opens with a full-page tinted portrait of Stalin and includes an illustrated article accompanied by a formal portrait of Lavrenti Beria, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia, within a section devoted to the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet rule in Georgia. Beria was executed in 1953, and Soviet-era publications bearing his image or writings were frequently defaced, censored, or had the relevant pages excised by subsequent owners; this copy has survived intact, with the Beria portrait and accompanying text fully legible and unaltered, a detail of real interest to collectors of Sovietica and students of the cult of personality in the Caucasus. The issue further contains the repertoire history of Tbilisi's Marjanishvili Theatre for 1928-1936, an announcement page for the special 1936 spring theatrical season featuring the Leningrad State Opera and Comedy Theatres, the Moscow Theatre-Studio, and Leonid Utyosov's jazz orchestra, and features on regional folk ensembles, illustrated with period photographs and pen sketches. The colophon, with its Glavlit censorship approval number and precise submission-to-press dates, is itself a document of the Soviet publishing apparatus at the height of the purge era. As an early, complete, illustrated Georgian-language cultural periodical of the high Stalinist period, uncensored, it is a scarce primary source for the study of Soviet Georgian visual and performing arts under Party direction.