During
the first half of the twentieth century, it might be said that the
field of Armenian Studies was built upon a quartet of pillars in the
fields of philology and history: Stepan Malkhasiants (1857-1947), Manuk
Abeghian (1865-1944), Nicholas Adontz (1871-1942), and Hakob Manandian
(1873-1952).
Stepan
Malkhasiants was born on November 7, 1857, in Akhaltskha (Javakhk, now
in Georgia). After finishing the Armenian parochial school and the
Russian provincial school of the town, in 1874 he entered the newly
opened Kevorkian Lyceum of Vagharshapat, which depended on the Holy See
of Etchmiadzin. Upon graduation in 1878, he pursued higher education at
the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the Imperial University of St.
Petersburg. He graduated in 1889 with a doctorate in Philology,
specialized in Armenian, Sanskrit, and Georgian. In 1885, still a
university student, he published a critical edition of tenth century
Armenian historian Asoghik’s
Universal History.
Two years later, he published his translation of William Shakespeare’s
King Lear,
directly from the English. In 1892 he would publish a translation of
Macbeth
.
From
1890-1910 Malkhasiants worked as a teacher at the Nersisian School of
Tiflis, where he also was principal from 1903-1906. Meantime, he married
Satenik Benklian. During those two decades, he published important
studies about the Armenian language and orthography, as well as ancient
literature, such as
The History of Sebeos and Movses Khorenatsi
(1893) and
Study of the History of Pavstos Buzand
(1896). He also published, in collaboration, a critical edition of Ghazar Parpetsi’s
History of the Armenians
(1904). He was an active contributor to the Armenian press in the Caucasus, particularly the journal
Ararat
of Holy Etchmiadzin and the daily
Mshak
of Tiflis.
Malkhasiants
continued his educational work in Tiflis during the 1910s, when he was
principal of the Hovnanian girls’ school (1910-1914). Then he accepted
an offer as principal of the Kevorkian Lyceum in Vagharshapat
(1914-1915), but when the lyceum was closed in 1917, he returned to
Tiflis and became principal of the Gayanian School.
In
1917 Malkhasiants was one of the founders of the Armenian Popular
Party, which in 1921 would become one of the founding parties of the
Armenian Democratic Liberal (Ramgavar Azadagan
)
Party. He moved to Armenia in 1919, and taught for a year at the primer
university opened in Alexandropol (nowadays Gyumri). His report to the
National Council (Parliament) of Armenia became the basis for the
adoption of the tricolor flag of the Republic of Armenia (1918-1920),
which would be re-established after 1991. He had the honor of presenting
the opening lecture at Yerevan State University on February 1, 1920.
Malkhasiants
continued his scholarly activities during Soviet times. In the last
decade of his life, he published an impressive number of studies: the
Russian translation of Sebeos’
History of Heraclius
(1939),
a critical edition of the medical treatise of Amirdovlat Amasiatsi
(1420-1496), the Modern Armenian translation of Movses Khorenatsi’s
History of Armenia,
and a monograph,
On the Enigma of Khorenatsi,
all in 1940, and the Modern Armenian translation of Pavstos Buzand’s
History of Armenia
(1947). In 1940 he received a title of doctor honoris causa, and in
1943 he was elected member of the founding body of the Armenian Academy
of Sciences.
Malkhasiants’ name, however, has become synonymous with his monumental
Armenian Explanatory Dictionary
(1944-1945),
a four-volume work of 2380 pages in three columns, which he compiled
between 1921 and 1943. This dictionary was unprecedented in the history
of Armenian lexicography, as it included the lexicon of Classical,
Middle, and Modern Armenian, old and new loanwords, and many dialectal
terms, with a total of 120,000 entries. It gave the grammatical
definition of each word, synonyms and antonyms, and examples for most
terms. The dictionary became a fundamental source for all dictionaries
of the Armenian language and bilingual dictionaries published afterwards
in Armenian and abroad. It won the State Prize of the Soviet Union
(called Stalin Prize at the time) in 1946, and it was reprinted three
times (Beirut, 1956; Teheran, 1982; Yerevan, 2008). An interesting
feature is that it was printed in classical orthography upon
Malkhasiants’ insistence. The prolific scholar passed away on July 21,
1947, at the age of ninety.
