Death of Rafael Ishkhanyan (February 6, 1995)

Rafael Ishkhanyan was a prominent expert of Armenian language and book history, and also an engaged intellectual in Soviet times and the first years of the second independence.

He was born on March 9, 1922, in Yerevan. His parents, Avetis Kirakosian and Haykanush Ishkhanyan, who had become Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1919, then divorced. Rafael lost his mother at the age of eight, and grew up with his maternal uncle and grandmother, adopting their last name. In 1937 he lost his father, who was shot during the Stalin purges. (He would later marry Burakn Cheraz-Andreasyan, whose parents, Vahan Cheraz, a founder of the Armenian scout movement, and Vartanush were also shot by the Soviet regime in 1928 and 1937.)

 

In 1939 Rafael Ishkhanyan entered the Faculty of Philology in Yerevan State University. However, he interrupted his studies in 1940 when he was drafted by the Soviet army. He was wounded in World War II, fell prisoner to the German army, and after being released, he returned to the battle front. After the end of the war, he was discharged and returned to his studies. After finishing university in 1949, he left for Moscow, where he also graduated from the Institute of Library Studies in 1954.

From 1955-1963, Ishkhanyan worked in the field of library studies. He entered the Public (now National) Library where he worked as a senior librarian, head of subdivision, and head of division, and also worked at the Matenadaran as director of the scientific library. He also taught at the distance course of the Pedagogical Institute of Armenia. In 1962 he defended his first Ph.D. dissertation about Axel Bakunts (1899-1937), one of the prominent writers killed during the purges. The following year, he entered his alma mater, where he would spend the next thirty years (1963-1992) teaching at the chairs of Armenian language and history of the Armenian language. His main subjects were Armenian contemporary language, dialectology, and history of the language of Armenian literature. He would defend his second Ph.D., “History of the language of modern Armenian literature,” in 1973, and earn the title of professor in 1978. In the late 1970s, Ishkhanyan published some of his major works, Bakunts’ Life and Art (1974), History of the Armenian book (vol. 1) (1977), History of the language of Eastern Armenian poetry (1978), and The New Literary Armenian in the Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries (1979).

From the 1960s, two controversial subjects attracted Ishkhanyan’s attention, who published his views whenever possible: the origin of the Armenian people, which he considered autochthonous to the Armenian Plateau, and the restoration of traditional orthography (in replacement of the “reformed” orthography imposed in 1922 and 1940). He would ardently defend his views until the end of his life. Not by chance, his first books published on the subject appeared in the Diaspora, because the views expressed did not make it possible to publish in Soviet Armenia: Our Fundamental Orthographic Question (1983) and The Origin and Earliest History of the Armenians (1984).

When the Karabagh movement started in 1988, Ishkhanyan was also at the forefront of the national issues that were attached to the claims for Karabagh, and particularly the status of the Armenian language in Armenia. He also wrote extensively about political issues, including Armenian-Turkish relations ( The Law of Excluding the Third Force, 1991). He became the editor of “Lousavorich,” a newspaper entirely published in traditional orthography. Two books on his views on Armenian origins were finally published in 1988 ( Questions on the Origin and Earliest History of the Armenian People ) and 1989 ( Armenian Native Words and Earliest Loanwords ). In the 1980s he had serialized a history of the Armenian people for children and teenagers, Armenian Illustrated History, of which the first volume appeared in 1990 (two more volumes would be posthumously published in 1997 and 2004). He published a total of forty books in his life and countless articles.

In 1991 Ishkhanyan was elected a deputy to the Supreme Council (the forerunner to the National Assembly) of Armenia and designated director of the National Library of Armenia. He passed away on February 6, 1995, in Yerevan. The school No. 153 of the Armenian capital now bears his name.

Birth of Stepan Malkhasiants (November 7, 1857)

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. 

Death of Hakob Manandian (February 4, 1952)

Historian and philologist Hakob Manandian was one of the most respected names in the field of Armenian Studies during the first half of the twentieth century.

He was born in Akhaltskha (Javakhk, nowadays Georgia) on November 22, 1873. He had his elementary education in the Karapetian School of his birthplace (1880-1883). In 1883, after the death of his father, he moved to Tiflis, where he continued his education in the first gymnasium of the city.

In 1893 twenty-years-old Manandian went to Germany to pursue higher education. He entered the School of Philosophy of the University of Jena, while following the courses of Oriental studies and linguistics at the universities of Leipzig and Strasbourg. He studied with the best scholars of the time, including well-known names in Armenian Studies like Heinrich Hübschmann and Heinrich Gelzer. In 1897 he defended his doctoral dissertation in philosophy  about the identity of the author of History of Aghvank, the earliest source on the history of the region between Artsakh and the right bank of the river Kura. This dissertation was published in Leipzig in the same year (Beiträge zur albanischen Geschichte, 1897).

Manandian moved to St. Petersburg in the fall of 1897 and finished his studies in one year at the School of Oriental Studies of the local university with a diploma of doctoral candidate in Armenian and Persian philology. After a year spent researching Armenian manuscripts in the libraries and museums of London, Paris, Vienna, and Venice, in 1899 he accepted an offer from the Gevorgian Seminary of Holy Etchmiadzin and started a thirty year career as an educator. He became a teacher of classical Greek and German, Greek literature, and history of philosophy until 1905. Meanwhile, he was one of the editors of the short-lived Armenological journal Zeitschrift für armenische Philologie (1901-1903).

In 1905 Manandian settled in Tiflis, where he taught German, Armenian, Armenian literature, English literature, and other subjects in the Russian gymnasia (1905-1907) and the Nersesian School (1906-1907). In 1909 he graduated from the Law School of the University of Dorpat (Tartu, nowadays Estonia). In the 1910s he moved to Baku and taught at the Popular University (1911-1913) and the Commerce School (1915-1919).

When Armenia declared its independence in 1918, Manandian was not only a seasoned teacher with two decades of experience, but also a well-reputed scholar. He was invited by the University of Yerevan in December 1919 (officially opened in Alexandropol) and became acting dean of the School of History, Linguistics, and Literature. After the establishment of the Soviet regime, he remained at the university. In the next ten years, he became rector (1921-1922), dean of the schools of Oriental Studies and History and Literature (1921-1924), head of the chair of Armenian history (1921-1925), and professor of the same chair (1925-1931). He left the university in 1931 to devote himself to scholarship.

Among his more than 150 works in Armenian, Russian, and German, Manandian produced a string of Armenian books in the last twenty-five years of his life, which cemented his lasting contribution to Armenian Studies. The first one was his monograph The Philhellenic School and Its Periods of Development (Armenian, 1928), followed by The Trade and Cities of Armenia in Relation to Ancient World Trade (Russian, 1930, translated by Nina Garsoian into English, 1965), Weights and Measures in the Oldest Armenian Sources (Armenian, 1930), Feudalism in Ancient Armenia (Armenian, 1934), The Main Roads of Ancient Armenia (Armenia, 1936), and others. However, his main works in this regard were the seminal monograph Tigranes II and Rome (Armenian, 1940, translated by George Bounoutian into English, 2007), and his masterwork, the three-volume Critical Survey of the History of the Armenian People (Armenian, 1945, 1952, 1957). The latter was meant to be a comprehensive history of Armenia from the sixth century B.C. to the sixteenth century A.D., which nevertheless remained unfinished.

Manandian’s scholarly and educational work was recognized in his lifetime. He became an emeritus scientific figure of Armenia in 1935, and received a second doctorate in history, without defense of a dissertation, in 1938. A year later, he was elected member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and, in 1943, member of the newly founded Academy of Sciences of Armenia. His contribution was also recognized by the Soviet Armenian government with the order of the Red Banner of Labor. He passed away on February 4, 1952. A street in Yerevan was named after him in the 1990s.

Birth of Nicholas Adontz (January 10, 1871)

A statue of Nicholas Adontz near the

museum of history of Sisian, named after him.

Nicholas Adontz was one of the most influential Armenian historians and philologists in the first half of the twentieth century at an international level. Poet Mushegh Ishkhan, one of his students in Brussels, wrote about him: “Nicholas Adontz seemed to be Armenia, the embodiment of its better qualities, its human image. He was the Armenian man, in the traditional, modern, and noble sense of the word; the living fortress of Armenian ancient culture, heroic history, beauty, and virtues of the Armenian character, who knows how to instill joy and pride.”

He was born Nikoghayos Ter-Avetikian in the village of Brnakot (Sisian, region of Siunik/Zangezur) on January 10, 1871. He traced his roots to Ter Avetik, a priest who was a close ally to David Bek, the hero of the Armenian rebellion of Siunik from 1722-1728. He studied for a very short period at the monastic school of Tatev and then at the Gevorgian Seminary of Holy Echmiadzin (1882-1891). He interrupted his studies and moved to Tiflis, where he studied Russian for a year and then entered the second year of the Russian gymnasium (1892-1894). He adopted the last name Adontz, derived from an ancestor of their family, to avoid being called “Ter-Avetikov.”

Adontz’s dreams to pursue higher education were fulfilled thanks to the sponsorship of benefactor Alexander Mantashov (Mantashiants). He first studied at the School of History and Philology of the University of St. Petersburg (1894-1899), where he had among his teachers the famous Orientalist Nikolai Marr. After graduating from the university, Mantashov sponsored his three-year sojourn in Europe, where Adontz studied and researched in Munich, Paris, Oxford, and Venice. In 1902, once the agreement was finished, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he passed his examinations for a master’s degree. Then he went to the Caucasus, where he studied the manuscripts of Echmiadzin and Tiflis. He also published a journal of Armenian literature, Banber grakanutian yev arvesti (1903-1904).

In 1908 Adontz published Armenia in the Period of Justinian in Russian, a remarkable study on the social and political structures of early medieval Armenia. He defended it as his master’s thesis in April 1909 and was appointed assistant professor at the University of St. Petersburg. His second monograph in Russian, Dionysus of Thrace and the Armenian Commentators, published in 1915, was an edition, along with the Greek original, of the early medieval Armenian translation of the grammar of Dionysus Thrax (a Greek grammarian of the second century B.C.), based on 30 manuscripts. He defended it as his Ph.D. dissertation and was appointed professor of the chair of Armenian and Georgian philology in 1916.

Also in 1916, Adontz first participated in the works of an archaeological expedition to Mush and Erzerum, and later headed an expedition to Van, at a time when Western Armenia was mostly occupied by Russia. In 1917-1918 he became honorary trustee of the Lazarian College of Moscow. After the October Revolution, he successfully fought to avoid that the Armenian manuscripts from Echmiadzin, and the Armenian libraries of the Lazarian College and the Moscow churches were incorporated into the “Alexander III” library of Moscow. In the spring of 1920 the Russian Academy of Sciences decided to send him abroad in a six-month study trip. The Armenian scholar did not wait for the documentation to be completed and left Russia on his own.

Adontz, who had actively participated in political activities about the Armenian Question in the 1910s, first settled in London and published the book Towards the Solution to the Armenian Question (in English, 1920). The next year he moved to Paris, where he had been named consultant for the Armenian National Delegation. He married singer Olga Hovnatanian and lived in the French capital for the next ten years. He continued publishing and lecturing, supported by benefactor Abraham Ghoukassiantz.

In 1931 an Armenian Studies chair, funded by millionaire Robert Werner; Eva-Zarouhi Nubar, Countess d’Arschot Schoonhoven (daughter of Boghos Nubar Pasha, founding president of the Armenian General Benevolent Union), and the Armenian community of Brussels, was founded within the Center of Oriental Studies at the Free University of Brussels (Belgium). Adontz was appointed to the position. He would teach an array of courses on Classical and Modern Armenian, as well as subjects of Armenian and Byzantine Studies, while continuing his publications and lectures.

However, Brussels did not offer him peace of mind. After a long illness, his wife passed away in 1935. He was deeply affected by this loss, and its impact took a strong toll from his body. In May 1940 Belgium was occupied by Nazi Germany. Adontz’s health problems became worse and he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He was admitted to a hospital in October 1941 and passed away on January 27, 1942. He was buried in the cemetery of Brussels. Adontz left more than 120 scholarly articles and monographs on the history and literature of Medieval Armenia, Armenian-Byzantine relations, Armenian-Greek philology, mythology, religion, and linguistics, in Armenian, Russian and French. In the last years of his life, he worked on a history of Armenia from the beginnings to the twentieth century, but he only completed the first volume (Paris 1946; Armenian translation, 1972). A collection of his most important Armenian-Byzantine studies was published in French (1965). The importance of his works for scholarship is evidenced by the fact that Armenia in the Period of Justinian was translated into English and published by historian Nina Garsoian in 1970 with revisions, a bibliographical note, and appendices (an Armenian translation appeared in 1987), while Dionysus of Thrace and the Armenian Commentators was published in French in 1971. Many of his works have appeared in Armenian since 1989, including a six-volume collection published in Yerevan from 2006-2011.