First English Collection of Studies on Yeghishe Charents Published by Mazda

‘Yeghishe Charents: Poet of the Revolution’

Edited by Marc Nichanian

with the collaboration of Vartan Matiossian

Despite an important but remarkably insufficient number of translations done in the past decades, the scholarly study of modern Armenian literature in the English language still remains a largely neglected field, mostly confined to the pages of specialized journals.

Yeghishe Charents: Poet of the Revolution, a 383-page book edited by Marc Nichanian, Associate Professor of Armenian Studies at Columbia University, with the collaboration of Vartan Matiossian, is a groundbreaking attempt at presenting the life and work of this poet, widely known by name, but insufficiently known by reading.

The book has just been released by Mazda Publishers of Costa Mesa, CA, as the 5th volume in its Armenian Studies Series. The publication has been made possible by a grant from the Fesjian Publication Fund at Columbia University.

This book offers a collection of articles and studies on Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937), who has always been considered as the poet of Revolution in Armenia and is certainly one of the greatest voices of the 20th century in the Armenian poetic tradition.

The volume partly gathers the essays presented at the Charents conference organized at Columbia in 1997 by Nichanian for the centennial of the poet’s birth and the 60th anniversary of his untimely and tragic death. It was the first time an international conference on a modern Armenian writer was held at a Western university.

Other important essays have been added in order to echo recent readings of Charents in the US. A general introduction proposes a reflection on the poet’s encounter with history, his infatuation with Mayakovsky, and the work of mourning that he felt obliged to carry out after his renunciation of Futurism in 1924. He was forced into this renunciation in order to save his life and his career as a national poet in a Communist setting. After 1926, Charents’s poetic works are but a long meditation on the resources of poetry in the aftermath of the repudiation of Futurism.

The reader will find contributions from the best specialists in Charents’ work. His daughter Anahid Charents—who in 1983 released the volume Unpublished and Uncollected Works after 20 years of struggle with the decaying manuscripts and censorship in Armenia—has an essay about the poet’s last years, which remain insufficiently studied.

In the opening essay, Robert Maguire has sketched a general, analytical view of Moscow’s cultural and literary policies in the 1920s and 1930s, an indispensable element in any reconstruction of the succesive stages of the poet’s intellectual and political biography.

The second part of the volume presents aspects of the reception of Charents in English by Peter Balakian, G.M. Goshgarian, James Russell, and Sonia Ketchian. The third part offers texts by scholars Vartan Matiossian, Krikor Beledian, Henrik Edoyan, and Marc Nichanian in Armenian.

The encounter of these different critical lineages in the same book tends to blur the boundaries between worlds that, it is usually said, do not communicate with each other. This was, after all, one of the objectives of the conference and of this book.