Avetik Isahakyan
Avetik Isahakyan wrote poems so close to folk song that many Armenians assume they are anonymous traditional lyrics. He spent decades abroad as an emigre before returning to Soviet Armenia, and his long poem Abu Lala Mahari made him known well beyond Armenian readers. His career links the world of Tumanyan to the middle of the twentieth century.
- Author
- Armat Editorial Team
- Updated
- Reading time
- 6 min read
Key facts
- Born
- 30 October 1875, Alexandropol, now Gyumri
- Died
- 17 October 1957, Yerevan, aged 81
- Birthplace
- Alexandropol in the Russian Empire
- Known for
- Folk-toned lyric poetry and the philosophical poem Abu Lala Mahari
- Notable works
- Songs and Wounds, Abu Lala Mahari, Lilith
- Literary period
- Armenian romanticism into the Soviet era
Early life and education
Avetik Isahakyan was born on 30 October 1875 in Alexandropol, today the city of Gyumri, into a family of modest means. The town was a lively centre of Armenian craft, music and humour. Its street songs and ashugh traditions shaped his ear for rhythm and phrase for good.
He studied at the Gevorgian Seminary in Etchmiadzin, the leading Armenian religious and educational institution, where he studied classical Armenian, history and theology in depth. He then went to Germany and attended lectures in literature and philosophy at the University of Leipzig. There he took in European romanticism and the pessimistic philosophy then in fashion.
His first collection, Songs and Wounds, appeared in 1897 and was an immediate success. Composers quickly set its short lyrics of love, separation and homesickness to music. Several became so widely sung that people forgot who had written them.
Literary career and exile
Back in the Caucasus, Isahakyan joined the Vernatun circle around Hovhannes Tumanyan in Tiflis and formed lasting friendships there. His political activity drew suspicion. In 1908 he was arrested in connection with the mass trial of Armenian political figures. He spent about six months in Metekhi prison and was released on bail in 1909.
In 1911 he left the Russian Empire and began a long period abroad, living at different times in Berlin, Venice, Vienna and Paris. He kept writing and became an important figure in Armenian emigre culture. After 1915 especially, he worked to support survivors and to keep the community's literary life going. He came back to Soviet Armenia in 1926 and stayed four years, then returned to Paris in 1930.
In 1936 he came home for good. He was received with honours, elected to the Academy of Sciences and served as chairman of the Writers Union of Armenia from 1946. He continued writing prose sketches, fables and lyrics until the end of his life.
Major works
Abu Lala Mahari, written between 1909 and 1911, is his best known long poem. In it, a wealthy poet of medieval Baghdad, sickened by human cruelty and hypocrisy, leaves the city and rides into the desert with his camel caravan. As he goes, he reflects on freedom, society and death. The poem was translated into many languages and won admirers among writers.
Songs and Wounds, his first collection, remains the core of his lyric reputation. Poems that open with a wandering exile or a mother waiting at the door use very simple words to powerful effect. That is why so many of them entered the repertoire of Armenian singers.
He also wrote narrative works drawing on legend and history, including the unfinished novel Usta Karo and a body of fables and prose sketches. In them he explored Armenian folk belief, medieval tales and the moral questions that stayed with him all his life.
- Songs and Wounds, poetry collection, 1897
- Abu Lala Mahari, philosophical long poem, 1909 to 1911
- Lilith and other legend-based poems
- Usta Karo, an unfinished novel
- Numerous fables and prose sketches
Themes and style
Longing is Isahakyan's great subject: longing for a lost home, a lost love, or a purer way of living. He spent so much of his life away from Armenia that exile, in his poems, is simply daily life. That gave them a special power for a scattered people.
His technique only looks simple. He used short lines, repetition, direct address and the words of folk song, and he avoided elaborate metaphor. Composers found the poems easy to set because their rhythms were already musical. Dozens of Armenian art songs use his texts.
At the other extreme stands Abu Lala Mahari, a poem of real philosophical ambition in which he takes on justice, mortality and human worth. Between the small lyric and the large meditation, his work covers a wide range.
Later years and legacy
Isahakyan died in Yerevan on 17 October 1957, shortly before his eighty-second birthday, and was buried in the Komitas Pantheon. By then he was a living link between the literary world before the revolution and postwar Soviet Armenia, and writers of every generation respected him.
His house museum in Yerevan preserves his library and manuscripts, and streets, schools and a major literary prize carry his name. Gyumri, his birthplace, treats him as one of its defining figures.
Above all, he lives on in song. Armenian singers, choirs and schoolchildren still sing his lyrics, often without knowing who wrote them. For a poet who wrote in the manner of folk song, that may be the result he would have wanted most.
Important dates
1875
Born in Alexandropol, the modern city of Gyumri.
1897
Publishes his first collection, Songs and Wounds.
1911
Completes Abu Lala Mahari and leaves for Europe.
1936
Returns permanently to Soviet Armenia.
1946
Becomes chairman of the Writers Union of Armenia.
1957
Dies in Yerevan and is buried in the Komitas Pantheon.
Why Avetik Isahakyan matters
Isahakyan showed that the simplest lyric forms could carry serious feeling. Writing in the language of folk song, he opened poetry to readers with little formal education. He also kept alive a rhythm and vocabulary that more literary styles might otherwise have pushed aside.
He gave the experience of exile a lasting artistic form. Many Armenians were scattered after 1915, and his poems of separation and a remembered homeland gave them exact words for what they shared. That is why his work travelled so widely through diaspora communities as well as within Armenia.
Interesting facts
- 01Several of his lyrics are sung as folk songs today, with many singers unaware that they have a named author.
- 02The Russian poet Alexander Blok, who translated some of his verse, described him as a poet of the first rank.
- 03He studied at the University of Leipzig, an unusual path for an Armenian writer of his generation.
- 04He spent most of the years between 1911 and 1936 abroad, in Germany, Italy, Austria and France, apart from a four-year stay in Armenia from 1926.
- 05He was one of the permanent members of the Vernatun circle that met in Hovhannes Tumanyan's Tiflis apartment.
Sources
- A. J. Hacikyan, G. Basmajian, E. S. Franchuk and N. Ouzounian (eds.). The Heritage of Armenian Literature, Volume III: From the Eighteenth Century to Modern Times — Wayne State University Press, 2005 ISBN 9780814332214
- Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian (eds.). Anthology of Armenian Poetry — Columbia University Press, 1978 ISBN 9780231045643
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