She
was born Sirvard Kaputikian in Yerevan on January 20, 1919. Her parents
were survivors from Van. Her father Barunak (1888-1919), a teacher and
member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, died of cholera three
months before her birth. She was raised by her mother and grandmother.
She published her first poem in 1933, when she had adopted the first
name Silva, and she attended the Faculty of Armenian Philology at
Yerevan State University from 1936 until her graduation in 1941. In the
same year, she became a member of the Writers Union of Armenia. By that
time, she had already married another poet who would become well-known,
Hovhannes Shiraz (1915-1985). They would have a son, the prominent
sculptor Ara Shiraz (1941-2014), and divorce later.
Kaputikian
joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1945. In the same
year, she published her first collection of poetry,
With the Days.
It
included a poem, “Words to My Son,” that would make her famous as one
of the most recognizable poems dedicated to the Armenian language and an
assertion of national identity. From that very first book until the end
of her life, her writing would focus around two subjects, national
identity and lyric poetry, where she also reflected traces of her
personal life.
She
studied at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow
(1949-1950). She established herself as a significant literary figure in
Soviet Armenia by the 1950s. She was awarded the USSR State Prize in
1952. During sixty years of publishing activity, she authored over sixty
books in Armenian, including poetry, travelogues, and essays, and
several in Russian. Her works were translated into Russian by well known
poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bulat Okudjava, and
others. She earned the title of Honored Cultural Worker of Soviet
Armenia (1970) and Soviet Georgia (1982).
In
the 1960s-1980s Silva Kaputikian traveled widely throughout Diaspora
communities in the Middle East, North America, and South America. She
published travel books about those visits, where she focused on Armenian
history—with some one-sided views—and an optimistic picture of the
future. Since the 1960s, she was an advocate of national causes. She was
an active participant in the April 24, 1965, demonstrations on the
fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and later criticized the
Communist Party for its failure to properly address the anniversary. For
decades, she went on a tightrope between Armenian nationalism and
Soviet internationalism, but was one of the most outspoken intellectuals
on issues of public concern, from the genocide to Soviet language and
nationalities policies to environmentalism. In early 1988 she was a
member of the first Karabagh Committee, together with fellow writer Zori
Balayan and activist Igor Muradyan, among others. In the same year she
won the Armenian SSR State Prize.
She
continued her literary and public activities in post-Soviet times. She
was elected a full member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences in 1994.
She became critical of the first two governments of independent Armenia,
especially of President Robert Kocharian. She was awarded the Mesrop
Mashdots Medal (1999) by the latter, but she returned it in 2004 after
the violent crackdown on the opposition on April of that year.
Silva
Kaputikian passed away in Yerevan on August 5, 2006, and was laid to
rest in the Komitas Pantheon. In 2007 a school of Yerevan was named
after her, and in 2009 a house-museum dedicated to her was opened. The
street on which the museum is located (formerly known as Baghramian Lane
1) was renamed Kaputikian Street.
