Eliso Tsintsabadze

Eliso Tsintsabadze was born in 1990 in Moscow, USSR. She played chess professionally, but quit her sport career to receive a degree in film at VGIK (the All-Russian State University of Cinematography named after S.A. Gerasimov). Following her studies she worked on different short movies, documentaries, feature films and animations before decideding to focus on her photography practice. In 2016 she graduated from the International Center of Photography, New York. Since 2017 she has not been based anywhere in particular and has been moving all around the globe with her camera.

Sylvan Sadness

“Sylvan Sadness” is the name of a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov. It is not an exact translation of the title “Lesnaya Toska”, but I never found the poem itself in English. The poem is a conversation between the forest, wind, mermaids and morning.

тоска, noun /ˈtō-skə/ – In dictionaries, the Russian word toska is described as some sort of melancholia, sadness, silence, yearning and anguish, but it does not have a proper equivalent in English.

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” — Vladimir Nabokov

To view more of Eliso Tsintsabadze’s work please visit her website.