An Armenian Eccentric: The Life and Times of Kara Darvish

[bell-the-cat]

An Armenian Eccentric: The Life and Times of Kara Darvish
by
Dr. James R. Russell

Kara Darvish (Hakob Genjian) was an Armenian Futurist poet who lived and worked mainly in Tiflis, Georgia, before and after World War I. He wrote several novels and manifestoes, but is best known for the "postcard" poems he distributed at cafés and outside cinemas which proclaim his cosmopolitan and revolutionary credo and experiment with odd typefaces and experiment with incantatory nonsense words in Armenian, dipping also into the Armenian mythological past. (His Russian Futurist colleagues named this technique zaum', i.e., transrational language.) Among his friends and associates were the poets Osip Mandelstam and Yeghishe Charents; and Kostan Zarian evokes the poet and his turbulent surroundings in the novel Navě Leran Vra (The Ship upon the Mountain).

Zaum poem delivered at Afrikyan's house, Yerevan.

[TomServo]

Re: An Armenian Eccentric: The Life and Times of Kara Darvish

Thanks bell. Could only watch 20 minutes but it's fascinating stuff and will resume later. I was interested in his side discussion of Sehlerai, a constructed language by an Armenian from Smyrna, and a simple Google search directed me to this article: http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/ha...pdf?sequence=1

He's right about the Armenian intelligentsia (whether in the diaspora or in the Republic of Armenia) clinging to tradition. The earliest generation of Armenian intellectuals within the Soviet Union were probably considerably freer to experiment than their successors. Stalin's purges and the strictly enforced requirement to adhere to socialist realism (as Russell says) pretty much brought an end to all that; despite fostering a sophisticated intelligentsia, the Soviets contributed to the normalization of the writing and prose style in much of Soviet (and post-Soviet) Armenian literature. Just how many poems do we need on the beauty of our lakes and mountains? And then you have authors like Mariam Petrosian (Martiros Sarian's great granddaughter) whose novel received colossal critical acclaim and accolades except that it's written in Russian.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: An Armenian Eccentric: The Life and Times of Kara Darvish

Thanks bell. Could only watch 20 minutes but it's fascinating stuff and will resume later. I was interested in his side discussion of Sehlerai, a constructed language by an Armenian from Smyrna, and a simple Google search directed me to this article: http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/ha...pdf?sequence=1

He's right about the Armenian intelligentsia (whether in the diaspora or in the Republic of Armenia) clinging to tradition. The earliest generation of Armenian intellectuals within the Soviet Union were probably considerably freer to experiment than their successors. Stalin's purges and the strictly enforced requirement to adhere to socialist realism (as Russell says) pretty much brought an end to all that; despite fostering a sophisticated intelligentsia, the Soviets contributed to the normalization of the writing and prose style in much of Soviet (and post-Soviet) Armenian literature. Just how many poems do we need on the beauty of our lakes and mountains? And then you have authors like Mariam Petrosian (Martiros Sarian's great granddaughter) whose novel received colossal critical acclaim and accolades except that it's written in Russian.

Thanks. Just finished reading it. I wonder why the illustrations are not there too?

In Armenian Studies everything seems to end with disaster or destruction. As Prof. Russell says towards the end of the lecture, quoting someone whose name I can't remember, "The grief of the loss is too great to speak of, so let us turn instead to the poems".