Writers of Disaster Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century: The National Revolution - Taschenbuch

The focus of this first volume is the historical phenomenon of the Armenian national revolution--the movement of national uprising among Armenians at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century--and its literary reception in Soviet Armenia.

The volume consists of essays on four major twentieth-century Armenian authors: Yeghishé Charents, Gurgen Mahari, Zabel Esayan, and Vahan Totovents.

All four authors lived through the national revolution. For all four of them, "the national idea was a perverted and murderous one." Ironically, however, all four were condemned to death or exile precisely for nationalism, victims of Stalin's purges.

Nichanian addresses a burning question that historians and diarists have avoided for the better part of a century: "How are we to understand the link between this movement of national liberation and the extermination of the Ottoman Armenians during World War I?"

To answer this question, Nichanian turns to literature: "Do writers and poets have more to say about the national revolution and its relatedness to the Catastrophe than, say, the actors themselves or the historians, or, again, the political interpreters of the events?" Nichanian writes in his preface. "Yes, they have, but not because they are able to see the historical circumstances with more insight, or because their interpretations are more accurate. They have more to say because of the power of literature, because literature is primarily, although paradoxically, linked to the work of mourning, and is able to explore the intricacies of mourning in its possibility and, more often, its impossibility."

The book features translations of long excerpts from Charents's "Requiem Æternam in Memory of Komitas" and "The Nayirian Dauphin"; Mahari's "Burning Gardens"; Esayan's "In the Ruins"; and Totovents's "New York." These literary translations, beautifully executed by G.M. Goshgarian and Ishkhan Jinbashian, are required reading for everyone with an interest in Armenian culture. That includes readers of Armenian, since the translations include passages that censors excluded from published versions of these works in Soviet Armenia.