The
best figures of Armenian literature in the Diaspora gathered in France
in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Besides Shahan Shahnour, Nigoghos
Sarafian, and Vazken Shousanian, the name of Zareh Vorpouni, although
much less known to the general public, managed to gain some critical
attention until the 1970s.
He
was born Zareh Euksuzian on May 24, 1902, in Ordu (Turkey), a city on
the southeastern shore of the Black Sea. He studied at the local
Movsesian school. His father was killed during the genocide, but his
mother managed to flee to Crimea with her family. At the end of the war,
the family moved to Constantinople, where Zareh attended the Berberian
School from 1919-1922. He published his first literary pieces in the
newspaper Joghovourti Tzayne, which he signed Zareh Vorpouni (vorp “orphan” is the Armenian translation of Turkish öksüz).
Like
thousands of Armenians leaving the Ottoman Empire as refugees during
the turmoil of the Kemalist massacres before the founding of the Turkish
Republic, Vorpouni and his family departed for France in August 1922.
They settled in Marseilles, where they lived for two years. In 1924 the
aspiring writer moved to Paris. In the same year, he jointly edited the
short-lived literary periodical Nor Havadk with
another aspiring writer, Bedros Zaroyan (1903-1986). From his early
days in France, he was an avid reader who acquainted himself with
European intellectual trends and prominent works of French literature.
He would also enter the French Communist Party, which he left in the
1930s.
Vorpouni,
who started publishing short stories and essays in the French-Armenian
press, soon conceived a cycle of novels entitled The Persecuted. The first volume, The Attempt, would
be published in 1929. It depicted the hard life of an Armenian
immigrant family transplanted to Marseilles, where they endured the
impact of a totally strange environment.
The novelist entered the group Menk
(We), which included a number of young intellectuals (also called “the
Paris boys”), mostly genocide survivors, bound to achieve a renewal of
Armenian literature by reflecting the social, cultural, and
psychological distress undergone by the newly-formed Diaspora and the
perils of identity loss. They published the journal Menk from
1931-1932 and then scattered away. Vorpouni moved to Strasbourg from
1930-1937 and, upon his return to Paris, he co-edited another
short-lived journal with Zaroyan, Lousapatz (1938-1939). He printed a volume of short stories, Room for Rent (1939),
which was only distributed after the end of World War II. Drafted by
the French army at the outbreak of the war, he was captured by the
Germans and held as prisoner of war in Magdeburg until 1945.
Returning
to Paris, in 1946 Vorpouni visited Soviet Armenia upon an invitation to
participate in the Second Congress of Soviet Armenian Writers. He
published his impressions in a volume, Toward the Country (1948). He returned to literature with a new collection of short stories, Rainy Days (1958), which was followed by another collection, Koharig and Other Stories,
in 1966. He explored the psychological features of his characters and
identity disintegration, with the trauma of genocide subtly felt through
these narratives.
In the 1960s Vorpouni also resumed his novelistic project after a hiatus of more than thirty years. After publishing And There Was Man (1964), which was independent of his cycle of novels, he wrote and published the following three novels of The Persecuted in the space of seven years: The Candidate (1967), Asphalt (1972), and An Ordinary Day (1974). The Candidate presented
the main character, Vahakn, embodying the tormented young generation
that bore the psychological trauma of the genocide and remained its
victim through their actions. The next two volumes probed the sources
for the anguish of their main characters. An anthology containing The Attempt, And There Was a Man, and some short stories was published in Yerevan in 1967.
Vorpouni passed away on December 1, 1980, in Bagneux, a suburb of Paris. Two of the last three novels of The Persecuted were posthumously published in literary journals in 1980 (Death Notice) and 1982 (For Thine Is the Power), while the seventh novel remains unpublished. An English translation of The Candidate, by Jennifer Manoukian and Ishkhan Jinbashian, appeared in 2016.
