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.
