Death of Raffi (April 25, 1888)

One hundred and thirty years after his death, Raffi has long become a classic of Armenian literature. He was born Hakob Melik Hakobian on September 5, 1835, in Payajuk, a village in the district of Salmast, in Iranian Azerbaijan. He was the eldest of nine siblings. His paternal family had been meliks (hereditary lords) of the village for many generations. His father was a wealthy farmer and merchant.

His education began in the home of the village priest. There, in a small cramped room adjacent to the barn, boys of all ages and levels of learning were taught under pressure of corporal punishment. In 1847, at the age of twelve, his father, who had always harbored a deep respect for education, sent him to Tiflis, a major center of Armenian intellectual life at that time, to continue his secondary education at the Nersessian School. Since the school had been shut down due to a cholera outbreak, the future writer enrolled in a boarding school run by a distinguished Armenian teacher, Garabed Belakhian. This school was administered under the aegis of the Russian gymnasium of Tiflis, and its curriculum was adapted to requirements for entry into that institution. Here, the young village boy learned literary Armenian and Russian, and acquired a privileged education. In 1855 he started drafting his first novel in Classical Armenian, which he later transposed into vernacular Armenian and would be posthumously published as Salbi (1911).

In 1856, when he had still a year to complete his gymnasium studies, he was forced to abandon his formal education and return home to help his ailing father with the family business. In 1857-1858 he visited Western Armenian, particularly the regions of Van and Mush, and acquainted himself firsthand with the plight of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In 1863 he married Anna Hormouz, the daughter of an Assyrian Protestant family. They had two sons and a daughter, who died at a young age. However, the death of his father in 1865 sent the family into ruin. Hakob Melik-Hakobian had to work as a sales clerk and accountant in Tiflis to try to take care of his extended family.

From 1872-76 he contributed to the newly published Mshak daily in Tiflis. He debuted with the penname Alexander Raffi, which would later become just Raffi. He subsequently took teaching posts in Armenian language and history at the Armenian school in Tabriz (1875), where he put into practice his modern educational values. Two years later, he had to leave the city due to his conflict with the conservative establishment, both Armenian and Persian. He took a teaching position in Agoulis, in the region of Nakhichevan, but in 1879, his progressive views became again a matter for clashes with the local wealthy sponsors, and he settled in Tiflis for good, where he continued his prolific work for Mshak . The newspaper would publish many of his novels in serialized form. A year before he had published to great acclaim his first book, Jalaleddin, a novel depicting the massacres of Armenians by a Kurdish chieftain in the southeastern corner of Western Armenia. The next critically and popularly acclaimed book would be the novel The Fool (1881), whose subject was the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. In the following years, the patriotic imagery and episodes of both novels would inspire many young people to devote themselves to the cause of the liberation of Western Armenia, which would end in the creation of revolutionary groups and then political parties.

Raffi, who underwent a brief search and house arrest by the Czarist police in 1883 under suspicions of being a revolutionary, met the relentless criticism of the Armenian conservative press. A jubilee for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his literary activities was planned in 1884, but forbidden by the authorities. His next novels, Davit Bek (1882), The Golden Rooster (1882), The Diary of a Cross-Stealer (1883), Sparks (two volumes, 1883-1884), and Samuel (1886), which depicted historical and contemporary issues, further cemented his fame. Raffi’s novels would transcend his time and become mandatory reading for the next generations.

In 1886, while Samuel was received with great enthusiasm by the public, Raffi’s health had started to decline. In 1888 he published his last book, The Five Melikdoms of Gharabagh. His lungs were failing, and he passed away on April 25, 1888. He was buried in the Armenian cemetery of Khojivank on April 29, with an enormous mass of people attending beneath a downpour. As another novelist, Shirvanzade, wrote years later, “Raffi’s was the first great public funeral. Never before had there been anything like it.”

Anna Raffi, the writer’s wife, later moved to London with his sons Aram and Arshag. She would be instrumental in the publication of Raffi’s unpublished works, as well as reprints of his already popular novels. Her sons would have an important literary and political activity in the British capital to the benefit of Armenian causes. Raffi’s works, prohibited in Soviet Armenia during Stalin’s time, were published in huge multivolume editions afterwards. Presently, there is a school as well as a street named after Raffi in Yerevan. His works have been translated into several languages, such as English, French, Spanish, and others.

Death of Zabelle Boyajian (January 26, 1957)

Alice Stone Blackwell in the United States and Zabelle Boyajian in England played a central role in the promotion in Armenian literature at the turn of the twentieth century.

Boyajian was born in 1873 in Diarbekir. Her father Thomas was a former Evangelical pastor who had become the British vice-consul in the city. After the death of his first wife, he had remarried to Catherine Rogers, an Englishwoman who was a descendant of poet Samuel Rogers (1763-1855). Her parents homeschooled her and taught her history, geography, and several languages (Armenian, English, French, Turkish, German, and Russian). They also instilled in her the love for Armenian and English literature.

During the Hamidian massacres of 1895, Thomas Boyajian was killed by the Turkish mob in Kharpert, where he was spending the summer with his family. His wife, together with their children Zabelle and Henry, relocated to London. Zabelle would spend the rest of her life in the British capital. She enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in University Central London (UCL). In 1901 she published her first work of fiction, the novel Yestere: The Romance of a Life, under the pen name Varteni, to avoid endangering the life of her relatives still living in Constantinople. It was based on the events following the massacres of Sasoun in 1894. The novel was very successful and it was immediately published in German. An Armenian translation remained unpublished, however.

Zabelle would actively devote herself to writing and painting. She wrote important essays on figures of world literature like William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and Euripides, but also published essays and many translations of Armenian literature.

She was close to Anna Raffi, widow of the famous Armenian novelist, and her sons Aram (1876-1919) and Arshak. In 1916 she compiled and translated the anthology Armenian Legends and Poems, which had an introduction by Viscount James Bryce and an essay on Armenian literature by Aram Raffi. The anthology was illustrated by her works inspired by Armenian legends.

In the same year, she participated in one of the many commemorative festivals taking place on April 23, 1916, on the occasion of the 300 ^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. She recited her personal ode to the Bard, entitled “Armenia’s Love to Shakespeare.” Her poetic tribute was selected, along with 165 others, to be published in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare.

As a painter, Boyajian had individual exhibitions in London in 1910 and 1912, in Germany in 1920, in Egypt in 1928, in France, in Italy, and in Belgium between 1940 and 1950. In 1921 a revised edition of the Armenian translation of Hamlet, by Hovhannes Masehian, was printed in Vienna, illustrated by her.

She published her most important work, Gilgamesh: A Dream of the Eternal Quest, a dramatic rendering in poetic form of the tale of the mythical Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, in 1924. She traveled widely and in 1938 published her travel notes and illustrations of Greece, In Greece with Pen and Palette . This was followed by a play, Etchmiadzin, in 1943, which was performed in New York in 1946. Two years later, she published her translation of Avetik Isahakian’s epic poem Abu Lala Mahari.

Zabel Boyajian passed away on January 26, 1957. Her Armenian Legends and Poems, which had been out of print since its first publication, was reprinted in 1958 in London and New York.