Gostan Zarian

Portrait of Gostan Zarian

Gostan Zarian ( Armenian Կոստան Զարեան ; born February 2, 1885 in Schemacha ; † December 11, 1969 in Yerevan ) was a productive, versatile Armenian writer, poet and painter.

Life

His father was a general in the Russian Army and died when Gostan was four years old. After graduating from the Russian high school in Baku , his family members sent him to Paris for further training because of his intelligence . There he enrolled at the College Saint Germain in Asnieres, near Paris.

Zarian later continued his studies in Belgium and received his doctorate from the University of Brussels . There he published a number of French and Russian writings. During this period of his life Zarian made the acquaintance of many writers, poets and artists. One of them should have a formative influence on him. The well-known Belgian poet and literary critic Émile Verhaeren advised Zarian to learn his own language so that he can express his true self and literary skills more authentically. Zarian followed this advice and during his stay with the mechitarists on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice from 1910 to 1913 learned Armenian and Grabar (Old Armenian ) intensively . There he immediately published a collection of his poems under the title Three Songs in Italian. A poem from this collection was set to music by Ottorino Respighi .

In Constantinople , then an important cultural center of the Armenian diaspora , where he stopped next, he founded the literary magazine Mehian with Taniel Vroujan , Hagop Oshagan and Kegham Parseghian . This group of writers and social critics were known as "Mehian writers". In the course of the 1915 genocide against the Armenians , the Armenian elite (writers, poets, and thinkers) were cruelly murdered, including most of the Mehian writers. Zarian was one of the few who was able to flee to Bulgaria and survive. Shortly afterwards he settled in Rome .

In 1919 he was sent to Armenia and the Middle East as a correspondent for an Italian newspaper . He returned to Constantinople in 1920, where he met with Vahan Tekeyan and a few other surviving writers and founded a new literary journal called Partsravank , which means monastery on a hill in Armenian . At the same time his second volume of poetry, The Crown of Days, appeared .

After the establishment of the Soviet Union, Zarian returned to Armenia and taught comparative literature at the Yerevan University. Thoroughly disappointed with the Soviet regime, he left Yerevan in 1925 and led a kind of nomadic life between Paris, Rome, Florence , Corfu Island, Ischia Island and New York . In the meantime he founded the magazine Le Tour de Babel in Paris .

From 1944 to 1946 he taught Armenian culture at Columbia University New York, where he also founded a magazine called The Armenian Quarterly , where authors such as Sirarpie Der Nersessian , Henri Grégoire and Marietta Shaginian wrote. Only two issues of this magazine made it to the literary world.

From 1952 to 1954 he taught art history at the American University of Beirut . Finally, after a stopover in Los Angeles , he returned to Soviet Armenia in 1961 and worked at the Charents Museum of Art and Literature. His novel The Ship on the Mountain ( The ship on the mountain ), whose original edition in 1943 in Boston was registered, was published in censored form in 1963 in Yerevan.

Works

• The Priest of the Village of Bakontz , trans. James G. Mandalian. Armenian Review 2, No. 3-7 (1949), pp. 28-39.
• Nave leran vra , Boston: Hairenik Publishing House, 1943.
• Le bateau sur la montagne , trans. P. The Sarkissian. Paris: Seuil, 1969.
• Bancoop and the Bones of the Mammoth , trans. Ara Baliozian. New York: Ashod Press, 1982.
• The Traveler and His Road , trans. Ara Baliozian. New York: Ashod Press, 1981.
• The Island and A Man , trans. Ara Baliozian. Toronto: Kar Publishing House, 1983.
• The Bride of Tetrachoma , trans. Ara Baliozian, Ararat. 1982.
• The Pig , chapter in A World of Great Stories , ed. H. Haydn and J. Cournos. New York: Avenel Books, 1947.
• The National Turkey Hen , trans. Ara Baliozian, chap. in Yessayan, Zabel , The Gardens of Silihdar and Other Writings. New York: Ashod Press, 1982.
• Krikor Zohrab : A Remembrance , trans. Ara Baliozian, Ararat. 1982.
• My Song , Ecce Homo , Alone and Morning , in Anthology of Armenian Poetry , ed. Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 189-193.

literature

• Lemyel Amirian : To the editor . Ararat, 1972, p. 33.
• Lemyel Amirian: The wound again: Dichotomy as the key to the armenian character . Ararat, 1974, pp. 40-43.
• Ara Baliozian : Historian of the heart . Ararat, 1980, pp. 70-72.
• Ara Baliozian: Intimate talk . Kitchener, Ont .: Impressions, Publishers, 1992, pp. 19-21, 112-113.
• Ara Baliozian: The greek poetess and other writings . Kitchener, Ont .: Impressions, Publishers, 1988, pp. 234-241.
• Lawrence Durrell: Constant Zarian - Triple exile , in The poetry review (January / February 1952).
• Hampartsoum Kelikian : The wound remains the wound: Armenian writers of our time . Ararat, 1973.
• Nina Kuprianova : Interview with Gostan Zarian . Soviet Literature, 1966.