A century and a half ago, “the greatest Armenian satirist born for laughter” after Hagop Baronian, in the words of novelist Shirvanzade, was born in Constantinople. Yervant Odian would surpass Baronian, the premier name in Armenian satirical literature, by the sheer number and variety of his works. His ability to write stories at any given instant was unique. Many of Odian’s works were published in daily installments, following the French model of the feuilleton, and some of them remained unpublished as books for long decades.
Born on September 19, 1869, Օdian grew up at the home of his uncle, the statesman and political figure Krikor Odian, where he witnessed the debates of famous literary names. He attended the Berberian Lyceum from 1882-1883, but he dropped out due to his weakness and completed his education with private tutors and insatiable reading in Armenian and French.
He started his literary career in 1887 with translations and literary studies. Five years later, he became assistant editor of the famous daily Hairenik of the Ottoman capital. He was producing a steady flow of chronicles, short stories, and novellas, drawing upon social and political issues. In 1896 Odian became editor of Hairenik, but in the same year, the persecutions and massacres started in Constantinople prompted him to leave the Ottoman Empire. For the next twelve years he would live as an exile in Greece, Paris, England, Austria, Egypt, and India, which he later portrayed in a memoir entitled Twelve Years Out of Constantinople (1912-1913). He published several newspapers in Greece, Paris, and Egypt, and wrote many works, including a series of stories under the title of The Parasites of the Revolution (1899).
After the Ottoman Revolution, Odian returned to Constantinople in 1909. He continued writing and publishing several satirical newspapers. In the period 1909-1915 he wrote several of his masterpieces of political and social satire: the first two parts of his novel The Comrade Panchooni (1910 and 1914), Family, Honor, Moral (1910), The Letters of a Trader (1914), The Wife of the Councilman (1915), two detective novels about the tyrannical rule of Abdul Hamid, Abdul Hamid and Sherlock Holmes (1911) and Saliha Hanum or the Army against the Tyrant (1912), his satirical profiles of Armenian political representatives ( Our Deputies, 1913). He also translated from French into Armenian Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1910) and Anna Karenina (1911), as well as works by Emile Zola, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Maxim Gorky, Mark Twain, and others. He also wrote a series of profiles of Armenian politicians, called Our Deputies (1913).
Odian avoided the roundup of April 24, 1915, but was arrested in August 1915 and deported. However, he survived three years and a half of a deportee life, and he depicted his recollections in the memoir Accursed Years (1918-1919). He returned to Constantinople after the armistice of October 1918 and resumed his literary activities, again contributing to newspapers (he contributed daily columns to various newspapers simultaneously) while editing some newspapers of his own and writing more novels, such as the three-volume The Spy Number 17 (1919-1921) and several others.
Like many other intellectuals, Odian abandoned Constantinople in 1922 after the triumph of the Kemalist movement and moved to Bucharest (Romania). Two years later, he moved to Tripoli (Lebanon), and then to Cairo (Egypt). He passed away օ n October 3, 1926, and was buried at the cemetery of Mar Mina.
The works of Yervant Odian have been translated into many languages (Turkish, French, Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish, and others). Both Comrade Panchooni and Accursed Years have been translated into English.
In 1964 Odian’s story “The False Spy,” directed by Henrik Malian, became one of the episodes of the film Monsieur Jacques and the Others, produced by Armenfilm. Almost three decades later, in 1992, Arman Manarian directed a cinematographic version of Comrade Panchoon that was also released by Armenfilm in Armenia. A street of Yerevan and a school in Vagharshapat have been named after Yervant Odian.
