Leo
was the pseudonym of an Armenian intellectual who produced an amazing
output of historical and literary scholarship at the turn of the
twentieth century.
Arakel
Babakhanian was born on April 26, 1860, in the village of Karintak,
near the town of Khankend (nowadays Stepanakert, the capital of
Artsakh). In 1878 he graduated from the diocesan school of Shushi. This
was the extent of his formal studies, which he would complement with
self-teaching. After graduation, he worked in Shushi and Baku as a
scribe for notary work, telegrapher, and manager of the “Aror” printing
house.
He was still a student when he started collaborating with the influential daily
Mshak
of
Tiflis in 1877. His views were shaped by the ideological tenets
maintained by Raffi, the novelist, and Grigor Artzruni, the founding
editor of
Mshak.
Over
the years, he would contribute to a number of publications from the
Caucasus to Europe. Initially, he wrote commentary and prose (short
story and novel). His most notable literary work was
The Daughter of the Melik
(1898). He even wrote a historical play,
Vartanank,
published in 1916.
In 1895 he moved to Tiflis, becoming secretary and contributing editor of
Mshak
until 1906
.
Afterwards,
he gradually shifted to scholarship and produced hundreds of articles
and dozens of books. First he entered the field of literary criticism,
with essays about many contemporary writers, and condensed his views in
his monograph
The Literary of Russian Armenians from the Beginnings to Our Days
(1904). On the other hand, he offered fresh interpretations of many historical issues. He produced a spat of book of history:
Armenian Printing
(2 vols., 1901-1902),
Catholicos Hovsep Arghoutian
(1902),
Grigor Artzruni
(3 vols., 1902-1905),
Saint Mesrop
(1904),
The Armenian Question
(1906).
After a year of teaching at the Gevorgian Seminary of Holy Etchmiatzin
(1906-1907), Leo returned to Tiflis and dedicated himself to
scholarship. He produced new books:
The Feast of the Armenian Book
(1912),
The Kingdom of Van
(1915),
The Documents of the Armenian Question
(1915), and the posthumously published
Ani
(1946). His most ambitious work, which remained unfinished, was the three-volume
History of the Armenians,
of
which he only saw the first volume published in 1916 (the other two
volumes were posthumously published in 1946 and 1947). This work of
almost 2,000 pages introduced Armenian history from prehistory until the
end of the eighteenth century (excluding the 12
th
-15
th
centuries). While his views were both fresh and sometimes not exempt of
controversy, Leo’s works were characterized by an encyclopedic use of
Armenian and foreign sources, archaeological, epigraphic, linguistic,
and philological materials, travelogues and memoirs, secondary sources,
et cetera.
In
1924 Leo moved to Yerevan by invitation of the government of Soviet
Armenia and became a lecturer of Armenian history at Yerevan State
University until his death. His classes became the first university
textbooks of Armenian history, toge
ther
with those of professional historian Hakob Manandian. He was given the
title of professor in 1925 and became a full member of the Institute of
Science and Art of Soviet Armenia (renamed Institute of Sciences in
1930).
While
in his pre-Soviet writings Leo gave primacy to the role of the
individual and spiritual and geographical factors, in the 1920s he tried
to accommodate himself to the new ruling ideology and reversed many of
his positions. The genocide appeared to have crushed his views. His work
From the Past
(1925)
offered a picture of the Armenian liberation movement that was
completely at odds with his positive approach of his formative years. He
repeated his negative evaluation in the two-volume
The Ideology of the Turkish Armenian Revolution
(1934). In his work
The Khoja Capital
(1934) he regarded the commercial capital as the moving force of Armenian modern history.
Leo
passed away in Yerevan on November 14, 1932, and was buried in the
Yerevan Pantheon. A street and a school in the Armenian capital have
been named after him. Leo’s bust has been placed at the central building
of Yerevan State University.
