The Armenian Poets in Song

The Armenian poet Yeghishé Charents was born in Kars, a provincial Armenian city under the rule of Imperial Russia. At seventeen, already author of published poems, he joined an Armenian volunteer army to fight against the Turks for the liberation of his people. He witnessed the calamities of World War I, and the extermination of his countrymen in 1915 by the Ottoman Government. The outcome of his bitter In 1916, he went to Moscow to pursue his literary endeavors. Fascinated by the October Revolution of 1917, he fought with the Red Army in the Russian and Armenian Civil wars. He became, along with Mayakovsky, the poet of the Russian Revolution. It is said that Stalin was one of Charents’ admirers.
In 1922, after the establishment of Soviet rule in Armenia, Charents went back to Moscow seeking a higher education. As a member of the entourage of avant-garde Russian poets, he assimilated the world literature, he discovered its new trends, and translated, among others, Poe, Whitman, Pushkin, Goethe and Baudelaire. Later on, spending two years in France, Germany and Italy, he witnessed the new atmosphere of the artistic movements of the 1920s. By 1926, he was the most celebrated poet in Armenian literature, whose poetry was in constant experimentation regarding language, form of expression, versification and genre.
In 1934 his “Book of the Road” appeared; one of the poems, “The Message,” contained an acrostic: “Armenian people, your only salvation lies in your united strength.” The book was banned, and Charents was severely criticized for his nationalism. The works he wrote afterwards were never published while he was alive. He was arrested in 1937, and died under mysterious circumstances in a KGB cell the same year. His unpublished manuscripts remained buried underground until Stalin’s death in 1955.
Charents’ creative life was a continuous chain of inner change and growth. Having traversed the path of extremely complex literary directions – symbolism, revolutionary romanticism, futurism, realistic monumentalism, neoclassicism, existentialism – Charents took the development of Armenian literature to the edge of latest achievements of the century’s artistic thought. This exceptional talent occupies a unique place in the history of the 20th century Armenian literature.