Gostan Zarian

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

Life

His father was a general of the Russian army and died as Gostan was four years old. After graduating from the Russian school in Baku, his family sent him due to his intelligence for continuing to Paris. He sat there at the College Saint Germain in Asnieres, enroll in the vicinity of Paris.

Zarian later continued his studies in Belgium continued and completed his doctorate at the University of Brussels. There he published a series of French and Russian fonts. In this period of life Zarian made ​​the acquaintance of many writers, poets and artists. One of them should have a formative influence on him. The famous Belgian poet and literary critic Emile Verhaeren advised Zarian to learn his own language, so that he can bring his true authentic self and his literary skill. Zarian followed this advice and learned during his stay at the Mechitarists on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice from 1910 to 1913 intensive Armenian and Grabar ( Altarmenisch ). There he published a collection of his poems at once under the title Three songs in Italian. A poem from this collection was set to music by Ottorino Respighi.

In Constantinople, Opel, at that time an important cultural center of the Armenian diaspora, where he stopped next, he founded with Taniel Vroujan, Hagop Oshagan, Kegham Parseghian the literary magazine Mehian. This group of writers and social critics were known as " Mehian writer ". In the wake of the genocide against the Armenians in 1915, the Armenian elite (writers, poets and thinkers ) were brutally murdered, including most of the Mehian writer. Zarian was one of the few who managed to escape and survive to Bulgaria. Shortly thereafter, he settled in Rome.

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

After the founding of the Soviet Union, Zarian returned to Armenia and taught at the Yerevan University Comparative Literature. Thoroughly disappointed by 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. Meanwhile he founded in Paris the magazine Le Tour de Babel.

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

From 1952 to 1954 he lectured art history at the American University of Beirut. Finally, after a layover in Los Angeles, he returned in 1961 after Soviet Armenia and worked at the Charents Museum of Arts and Letters. His novel The Ship on the Mountain ( The ship on the mountain ), the original issue was registered in 1943 in Boston, 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.
• The Pig, chapter in A World of Great Stories, ed H. and J. Haydn Cournos. New York: Avenel Books, 1947.
• My Song, Ecce Homo, and Morningstar alone, in Anthology of Armenian Poetry, ed Diana The Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 189-193.