An Armenian Bibliography, with Cats
Or, reposting from my old blog during my Armenian vacation
I’m out of the country this week and next for a vacation to Armenia. Visiting friends, family, and old Peace Corps colleagues in the world’s most hospitable country is pretty much a full-time job, so I have no time to write anything. Hopefully, all this time spent around Yerevan’s wonderful bookshops and old museums will make grist for future writings.
Meanwhile, please enjoy this old post from my old blog, concerning one of my favorite topics: books about Armenia. I have fixed a few typos that slipped through, and slimmed down a few long sentences.
Remember last year, when I wrote a bunch of posts based on my notes for a history presentation that I gave to incoming Peace Corps volunteers? Well, I gave that presentation again this year to another incoming cohort, which is why I haven’t posted anything new here for a few weeks: I was too busy re-learning things that I (ostensibly) already knew and didn’t have the energy to write about school, or farm animals, or the barn cat I’ve befriended . Since I’ve already written posts about history, I didn’t know what to say on the blog. But then, I thought that anybody interested in my old history posts who wants to know more about Armenia would almost certainly be better served reading books by experts, or at least actual Armenians. So, I’ve put together my own personal Armenian reading list. These are the books that have informed my own work and opinions on Armenia, along with my own commentary on them.
Also, I don’t really have any new pictures to break up these lists with besides the barn cat I’ve been hanging out with, so I’m just going to use those.
Armenian Literature
The first place to start is the literature of Armenia itself. This is a weird and incomplete category, because the current state of English translations of Armenian literature is sadly incomplete and, where it does exist, quite outdated. With that in mind, here are the few worthwhile books I’ve enjoyed:
The Daredevils of Sassoun (prose translation)
Armenia’s national epic (known as Sasna Tsrer in Armenian) is a collection of folktales about the exploits of four generations of the Armenian Sasuntsi clan as they protect their lands from Arab invaders, especially the dastardly Misra Melik, caliph of Baghdad. Although Melik runs one of the world’s largest, most advanced cities, he seems to spend most of his time tugging at his beard and figuring out how to humiliate Armenians. The Daredevils are a rowdy bunch, keen to put off their holy mission to save Mother Armenia whenever busty damsels or casks of wine are involved—one lengthy detour involves David Sasuntsi’s quest to marry the Princess of China, who sends him a marriage request because she’s heard he’s the hottest hunk in the world—but as soon as their appetites are sated, they ride out to repulse Misra Melik’s hordes with gleeful ultraviolence. Daredevils first took form sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries AD, as Armenia was coming out of a long period of Arab domination, although many of its stories have elements dating a thousand years back to pre-Christian Armenian mythology. It wasn’t until the 19th century, with the Armenian bardic tradition in steep decline, that some monks thought to write it all down. Several translations exist, though none of them are particularly new or easy to find. I read the Leon Surmelian version, published in 1964.
The Book of Lamentations, by Grigor Narekatsi
Also know as the Book of Narek or just the Narek, The Book of Lamentations is the most famous collection of poems by the first great Armenian poet, Grigor Narekatsi, or Gregory of Narek. Except for his birth in a city near Lake Van around AD 950 and the fact that the Church viewed him at a heretic after his death, very little is known of Grigor’s life. All that we have from him is this long book of mystic, evocative poems that describe the joys and agonies of life and the spirit. Like Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is deeply personal poetry from a man whose inner life is otherwise a complete blank space in our records. What is known is that his heretical, mystic views were at first denigrated by the church, although Grigor’s popularity with Armenians was such that they eventually recognized him as a saint (the Catholic Church has actually followed suit and recognized him, too). The book is everywhere today, mostly because it’s said to contain magical powers and spells for healing, a belief that once prompted the 20th century poet Paruyr Sevak to quip that the book had been more kissed than read.
David of Sassoun, by Hovhannes Tumanyan
A retelling of one of the cycles from the Daredevils by Armenia’s national poet. While many Armenians are only familiar with the original Daredevils through adaptations, illustrations, and reputation—the same way your average English speaker is vaguely aware of, say, Macbeth or Antony and Cleopatra but hasn’t read them—everybody knows this one, and many can quote it at you. Tumanyan has had the good fortune to be the national poet of a nation that reveres poetry, and because the story of heroic Armenian resistance to foreign empires is never not relevant to current affairs here, this is one of his most-loved poems.
Armenian Poems: by Alice Stone Blackwell
Blackwell, a 19th century daughter of classic Boston Brahmin intellectual types, is America’s first major translator of Armenian literature. Here she translates a number of the major 19th century Armenian poets. How ably or creatively she does it I can’t say, although I have my suspicions that most Armenian poets didn’t actually write like A.E. Houseman, Rudyard Kipling, or other popular British poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At least it’s free.
Armenian Legends and Stories, Zabelle C. Boyajian
There are a number of Armenian books available on Gutenberg along these lines. I prefer this one for its selections from the History of Armenia by Movses Khorenatsi, one of the few places anywhere that I’ve been able to find the 5th century chronicle (Armenia’s earliest written history) available in English.
Seven Songs of Armenia, by Gevorg Emin
Non-essential and probably hard to find outside Armenia, but there is a copy at the Peace Corps volunteer library worth checking out. Emin was a poet and Armenian nationalist in the late Soviet era, but where so many nationalisms finally shed their patriotic shroud to reveal (and revel in) ecstatic hatreds and kooky pseudoscience, Emin is just a peaceful eccentric who sees his country as God’s own underdog. His seven “Songs” are Whitmanish essays about stones, water, books, or whatever else he likes about Armenia. I include it here as a good primer on Armenian nationalism when it’s in a friendly, approachable mood. There’s also a statue of Emin with his cat in Yerevan’s Lover’s Park on Baghramyan Avenue.
General History
These are books and sources that have been most helpful to me in learning and interpreting the long history of Armenia as a culture, nation, and various states. I have organized them alphabetically by title.
100years100facts.org
100 Years 100 Facts was created as a part of the centennial of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and, just like the name says, has 100 facts about Armenia, all of them supported by citations. It’s an excellent website for skimming around and learning some of the more notable aspects of Armenian culture.
Ancient.eu
The Ancient Encyclopedia is an online source, free to the public and full of articles by academics on topics across the range of ancient history in Europe and the Middle East. Thanks to generous grant funding, there is a huge selection of high-quality articles covering various aspects of ancient and classical Armenian history.
Armenica.org
While I don’t think the site has been updated in a long time and is not the best-organized website out there, I’m putting Armenica on here solely for its wonderful collection of historical Armenian maps, covering everything from Urartu in 890 BC to an essential season-by-season collection on the 1988—1994 Nagorno-Karabakh War.
The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars, by Razmik Panossian
For history nerds and social studies buffs only, but essential for them. Panossian is a diasporan political scholar and reigning expert on Armenian nationalism. The first section, on Armenian history, isn’t comprehensive, but this is deliberate: Panossian focuses only on events that have had relevance to modern Armenia and its self-conception, and so are the things you can expect average Armenians to know. Imagine an American history that focuses on the Gettysburg Address and MLK, but not on the Battle of Gettysburg or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and you’ve got the idea. I’ve shamelessly stolen Panossian’s framework in my own presentations on Armenian history, and they’re a lot better for it. The rest of his book, on nationalism in Armenia, has made me much less ignorant of Armenian perspectives and attitudes than I might otherwise have been.
Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, by Charles King
There’s no way to write a single-volume history of the entire Caucasus. It can’t be done. King knows this, although his book’s subtitle doesn’t: instead of getting deep into 5th century Georgian politics or Chechen nationalism, King tells the story almost entirely from the Russian perspective, from early stabs at imperialism in the 18th century to the post-Soviet guerrilla warfare in Chechnya. As a small country whose history is often shaped by its neighbors, this is a useful overview of some of the most influential forces at work in Eastern Armenia under Russian empires.
Black Garden, by Tomas de Waal
The best book on the Nagorno-Karabakh war available in English, and not just because it’s the only one there is. De Waal interviewed Armenians and Azerbaijanis for years to put together this book about the 1988—1994 war for control of the majority-Armenian province of Karabakh. The conflict, still unresolved, killed tens of thousands and caused the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands on both sides, crimes which neither side will admit to. Neither side will publicly admit to de Waal’s telling of events, either, which tells you that he’s on the right track.
The History of Armenia, by Simon Payaslian
As far as I can tell, this is the standard Armenian history in English; not many other books will cover everything from Urartu to the Karabakh War, or at least I haven’t seen them yet. There are no frills, no maps, no hard ideological angles: just the straight story, all thirty centuries of it.
The Armenian Genocide
First of all, there is no doubt whatsoever that the 1915 Armenian Genocide was real, premeditated by the Ottoman government, and deliberately undertaken with the intention of destroying or removing the Armenians of Western Armenia. No responsible scholar has ever found otherwise, and none of the sources shared here participate in the Republic of Turkey’s campaign to deny the events of 1915. While a number of excellent memoirs exist from genocide survivors and their descendants, I have limited myself here to a few of the most crucial and relevant books.
A Shameful Act, by Taner Akçam
Not the first book on the Armenian Genocide that you should read, but certainly one of the most important. Akçam is one of the few Turks that Armenians respect, and for good reason: he has endangered his own life and made himself an enemy of the Turkish government by telling the truth about its denialism. (He was arrested for it! He broke out of a Turkish prison! He sneaked back into the country, where nationalist gangs have promised to kill him, in order to attend the funeral of a prominent Turkish Armenian! This guy is amazing.) A Shameful Act is a study of all the extant documents from the Ottoman archives—court transcripts, conference minutes, carbon copies, telegraphs—which establish, beyond all doubt, that the actions the Ottoman Empire took against its Armenian population was a genocide, executed with the intention of clearing out central Anatolia for the establishment of a “Turkish” homeland. Akçam is an academic writing for academic audiences and presumes background knowledge of the genocide, but if you’re truly interested in the history of the Armenian genocide (or genocide studies in general) this is a book worth reading.
Burning Tigris, by Peter Balakian
This is the first Balakian to read, and the only one I’ll put on here, but as a rule, Balakian’s books on Armenian history are all worth reading. This one just happens to be the most easily-available, and the easiest for the curious American to get into. Balakian, an Armenian-American poet and scholar, focuses on the 1894 Hamidian Massacres and the 1915 Armenian Genocide through an American perspective, following the diplomatic staff and missionaries on the ground during the genocide and the American response. It is an excellent introduction to the Genocide for American readers.
They Can Live in the Desert, But Nowhere Else, by Ronald Grigor-Suny
What’s true of Balakian is even truer of Grigor-Suny: when it comes to Armenian history, he is The Man. Another Armenian-American, Desert is his book on the genocide and Armenia’s long, ongoing quest for recognition in the face of evil—there is no other word for it—efforts by the Turkish government to obscure and deny it. I haven’t read any of Suny’s other works in full, but what I’ve read have convinced me that if a Suny book interests you, you ought to read it.
Memoir and Reportage
The astute reader will notice that these are mostly by 20th century Russian authors and not always directly about Armenia. The truth is that as a Russian literature fanatic, my first exposure to Armenia, long before I thought I’d live and serve here, was through these books, and as such they hold a very special place in my heart. They also happen to be some of my favorite Russian writers of all. I have organized these chronologically.
Journey to Armenia, by Osip Mandelstam
A travel memoir shot through with essayistic digressions on history, science, and language by one of Russia’s great poets, An Armenian Journey marked a turning point in Mandelstam’s poetics. His encounters with the Armenian language (he called it a “wildcat” in another journal) and history (the image of Sevanavank, an island in 1933 but a peninsula today, is central to the piece) encouraged him to make poems with more vigor and sensation. Unfortunately, it was the last thing Mandelstam published before an unfortunate epigram about Stalin sent him on his way to a rasping, damp death in a work camp outside Vladivostok.
An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman
After the state seizes his 900-page magnum opus Life and Fate (Russian novelists don’t mess around with themes), even going so far as to take his typewriter ribbons (Russian censors don’t mess around with anti-state themes), Vasily Grossman fell into a deep depression. The Soviet government, sensing it may have angered one of its most important and influential artists and eager to avoid accidentally elevating him through damnation like they did with Pasternak, offer him a sop: he can’t publish his novel about Stalingrad, but he can go to Armenia, help translate a big, tedious Armenian novel, and write pretty much anything he wants about his trip in a memoir. Like Mandelstam before him and Bitov after, Grossman was won over by Armenian hospitality, and wrote a 100-page paean to the country. The book is full of sharp observations of Armenians, ranging from mountainside peasants to Catholicos Vazgen I. He also writes beautifully and at length about the horrors of nationalism, genocide, and the brotherhood of Jews and Armenians. (Sadly, modern politics have done much to poison the ancient friendship between the two cultures.)
A Captive of the Caucasus, by Andrei Bitov
Yet another memoir of a Russian writer who comes to Armenia to rediscover his zest for life in the sun-drenched biblical land peopled by wise, humble farmer-poets. I only keep sharing these because they’re so damned good, and in this case because Bitov, Russia’s great postmodernist (books within books and all that) pays more attention than his literary forebears to Armenia’s rapid industrialization and modernization.
Imperium, by Ryszard Capuscinski
Poland’s great journalist and chronicler of European colonialism’s collapse from the 1950s through the 1980s, Capuscinski seems at first to be an odd fit for the Soviet Union. Then again, as he makes clear in every chapter of the book, whatever its ideological underpinnings, at heart the Soviet Union was a colonial empire, its collapse uncannily similar to the retreat of British, French, and Portuguese power across Africa and Asia. The chapters on Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early days of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, when it was technically a covert civil war between Soviet states, are especially useful for our purposes.
There Was and There Was Not, by Meline Toumani
An Armenian-American journalist, uncomfortable with the confrontational approach towards Turkey and genocide recognition taken by the Armenian diaspora, and a curiosity for how much (or how sincerely) ordinary Turks believe Turkish propaganda about the 1915 genocide, moves to Istanbul and learns Turkish. This was a hugely controversial book among Armenians when it came out—among other things, Toumani says that demanding international genocide recognition is a self-defeating policy, and that Turkish food is delicious—so definitely don’t go around trying to argue its points with Armenians, or assume that everybody will be sympathetic to the author’s perspective. Still, it’s a good book, and its dual Armenian-Turkish perspective on the 1915 genocide makes it nearly unique among popular books about Armenia.
And that’s all for a while. Come to Armenia some day, and happy reading!