Paruyr Sevak

Early life and education

Paruyr Ghazaryan was born on 24 January 1924 in Zangakatun, then called Chanakhchi, a village in the Ararat valley south of Yerevan. He grew up in a farming family, and the landscape and speech of the region stayed in his poetry all his life.

In 1940 he entered Yerevan State University to study Armenian language and literature. He graduated in 1945 and went on to postgraduate research. The editor Ruben Zaryan gave him the pen name Sevak, in memory of the poet Ruben Sevak, who was killed in 1915. The name showed from the start where his literary loyalties lay.

From 1951 to 1959 he studied and then taught at the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. In Moscow he met Russian poetry and world poetry in translation, and he saw the cautious easing of cultural controls after 1953. He came back to Yerevan with a much wider sense of what a poem could attempt.

Literary career

Sevak published his first collection in 1948 and several more over the next decade, but he found his mature voice only at the end of the 1950s. Later he worked at the Institute of Literature in Yerevan, first as a researcher and then in a senior role. In 1966 he was elected a secretary of the board of the Writers Union of Armenia.

He was an active translator and critic too, and he wrote a substantial scholarly study of the eighteenth-century troubadour Sayat-Nova. As a critic he argued for honesty and craft against formulaic official verse. He also encouraged younger poets who wanted to write about private experience.

His public standing grew steadily through the 1960s. Readings drew large audiences, his books sold out quickly, and he became one of the few writers whose opinions carried weight with both the intelligentsia and the general reading public.

Major works

The Unsilenceable Belfry, published in 1959, is his central achievement. The poem is built around the life of Komitas, the priest and musicologist whose mind gave way after the genocide. Through his story, Sevak speaks about the destruction of Western Armenian life. It came out four decades after the genocide, years before public commemoration was allowed, and readers took it as an act of courage as much as a work of literature.

Let There Be Light, issued in 1969, collects the poems of his last decade and shows his range: love lyrics, sharp epigrams, meditations on science and history, and poems about ordinary domestic life. Man in the Palm of the Hand, from 1963, gathers his philosophical verse about human responsibility and the individual conscience.

He also wrote the long poem The Three Voiced Liturgy and a body of shorter poems that are widely anthologised. His scholarly monograph on Sayat-Nova, defended as a doctoral dissertation, remains a respected contribution to Armenian literary history.

• The Unsilenceable Belfry, long poem about Komitas, 1959
• Man in the Palm of the Hand, poetry collection, 1963
• Let There Be Light, poetry collection, 1969
• A scholarly monograph on the poet Sayat-Nova
• Numerous translations and critical essays

Themes and style

Sevak wrote about conscience. His poems keep asking what a person owes to truth, to the dead and to their own convictions. He welcomed modern life, science and technology into poetry as fit subjects. He disliked ornament and preferred a direct, argumentative voice.

He was inventive with form. He mixed free verse with rhymed stanzas, used long accumulating sentences, broke lines for emphasis and let colloquial speech sit beside high rhetoric. Some contemporaries found the results uneven. Readers, though, were drawn to the sense of a mind thinking aloud on the page.

Memory of the genocide runs through his work. He came at it through individual people and specific images, avoiding general lament. This let him write about the subject with a seriousness that abstraction would have blunted.

Death and legacy

On 17 June 1971 Sevak and his wife Nelly were killed in a car crash as they drove back from his native village towards Yerevan. He was forty-seven. The death was sudden, and he was a prominent critical voice in the nation, so many people came to suspect that the security services were involved. The suspicion has never faded. The only inquiry was a Soviet one, and it recorded a traffic accident. The archives that might settle the question have never been opened. He was buried in the garden of his family house in Zangakatun.

The village home is now the Paruyr Sevak House Museum. Schools, streets and a literary prize carry his name, and his poems are standard reading in Armenian classrooms.

Sevak matters most for what he made it possible to say. The Unsilenceable Belfry, written when it was, helped move remembrance of 1915 from private grief into public culture. Many readers see that shift as part of the climate that led to the commemorations of 1965 and the building of the memorial at Tsitsernakaberd.