Death of Moushegh Galshoyan (October 15, 1980)

In Soviet times, Armenian culture had its share of absurd and, sometimes, enigmatic deaths. Three of their representatives ended their lives when they were on or about to become forty-seven-years-old. Poet Paruyr Sevak (1924-1971) and painter Minas Avetisian (1928-1975) died in car accidents whose circumstances have not been totally elucidated. A less known name, writer Moushegh Galshoyan, would also share that tragic fate.

Galshoyan was born Moushegh Manoukian on December 13, 1933, in the village of Mehriban, now Katnaghbiur, in the area of Talin (district of Aragatzotn). His parents were survivors of the genocide from the area of Sasoun. His father had lost his first wife and four children during the massacres.

The future writer, who would take the ancestral Galshoyan name, reflected in his ethos and his literature the heritage of Sasoun to the point that his writings about the survivors of that area seemed to have been the work of someone who was born and lived there, and had shared the nightmare of the massacre and deportation.

Galshoyan graduated from the Agricultural Institute of Yerevan in 1957 and worked for a few years in his field, until he switched to journalism. In the 1960s he worked first at the three-weekly Avangard and, afterwards, at the newly founded monthly of the Writers Union of Armenia, Garoun, which became one of the freshest voices of Armenian literature.

The distance from journalism to literature was not too big, and in 1969 Galshoyan published his first collection of short stories, Crane. However, he established his maturity as a writer with the short novel Dzori Miro, first published in 1971 in Garoun. Here, he introduced still present and fresh questions about the past and the impossibility to come to terms with the world for the injustice that had been committed. The writer’s heroes seemed to be the actual offspring of the heroes of the national epic David of Sasoun, as they shared their qualities, and the fedayees who had fought against Turkish oppression at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1971 he graduated from the courses of the Institute of Literature “Maxim Gorki” of Moscow. He published a second collection of short stories, Flourished Stones (1973), and the novel Where They Toast Linen (1974).

On October 15, 1980, two months before his forty-seventh birthday, Moushegh Galshoyan was killed in his birthplace, Katnaghbiur, from an accidental shot from his own gun when he had stopped to take a break during hunting. In 1981 a posthumous collection of his short stories, The Clouds of Mount Marout, was released, and earned him the State Prize of Armenia. His novel Dzori Miro was published as a book in 1983. Two years before, it had become a successful film, with Sos Sargsian in the main role.

Birth of Paruyr Sevak - January 26, 1924

Paruyr Sevak was the successor of Yeghishe Charents in Soviet Armenian poetry, and was widely admired during his lifetime. Both had a short life, tragically cut off, although under different circumstances.

Paruyr Ghazarian was born in the small village of Chanakhchi (now Zangakatun), in the district of Ararat, in Armenia. His parents were humble villagers. He attended the local school and graduated with honors in 1940, moving to Yerevan to study at the philological faculty of Yerevan State University. He had written his first poetry at the age of thirteen, and three of his poems appeared for the first time in the monthly Sovetakan Grakanutiun in 1942, with the signature Paruyr Sevak. The editor of the monthly, Ruben Zarian, was a literary scholar fond of Rupen Sevag, a fine poet who had been killed together with Taniel Varoujan in the Armenian genocide, and thought of perpetuating his memory by using his name as a pseudonym for the 18-year-old beginner.

Sevak graduated in 1945 and started postgraduate studies of Armenian literature at the Manuk Abeghian Institute of Literature of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. However, he had to cut his studies short in 1948. In the same year, he published his first book, The Immortals Command. He married linguist Maya Avagian and had a son, Hrachia.

In 1951 he moved to Moscow to study at the Maxim Gorky Institute of World Literature. There he met his future second wife, Nelly Menagharishvili, who would give him two more sons, Armen and Koriun. He graduated in 1955 and worked there from 1957-1959 as an instructor at the chair of Literary Translation.

Meanwhile, during the eight years of ostracism, he had managed to publish poetry, translations, and literary criticism in the Soviet Armenian press. His three books of poetry, however (Uncomprising Intimacy, 1953; Love Road, 1954; and With You Again, 1957), failed to unleash his entire potential. His long poem of 1959, The Unsilenced Belfry, dedicated to the life of Komitas Vardapet, made his name instantly known by Armenian readers throughout the world. The book earned him the National Prize of Armenia in 1966.

Sevak went back to Yerevan in late 1959, and returned to the Manuk Abeghian Institute of Literature as a scholarly researcher from 1963-1971. He served as secretary of the Board of the Writers Union of Armenia from 1966-1971. In 1968 he was elected a representative at the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian SSR.

During the sixties, Sevak became the most powerful voice of Armenian poetry, and his articles on literary and public issues were widely read. In 1963 he published a groundbreaking collection of poetry, The Man in the Palm, which marked the return to the path of modernism that had been closed since the death of Charents a quarter of a century before.

In 1966 the poet and scholar defended a doctoral dissertation on the life and work of Sayat-Nova, the popular troubadour of the eighteenth century. After a defense of his dissertation that lasted four hours, his work was so highly esteemed that he was conferred with a second doctorate degree when the dissertation was approved and published in 1969.

Paruyr Sevak was not a dissident, but, as many intellectuals under the Soviet regime, some of his work clashed with censorship. This was particularly notorious when his last collection of poetry, Let There Be Light, was printed in 1969, but because of censorship issues, the entire edition of 25,000 copies remained undistributed until his death on June 17, 1971, in a car crash, while driving back to Yerevan. His wife also died in the crash, and only his two children survived. The circumstances of the accident were suspicious, and they have given fodder to lingering doubts about foul play by the Soviet regime.

The 47-year-old poet and his wife were buried in the backyard of his home, in Chanakhchi, which later became a museum. The village was renamed Zangakatun after the independence of Armenia in honor of his poem The Unsilenced Belfry (Անլռելի զանգակատուն, Anlreli zangakatun).