Daniel Varoujan

Who Daniel Varoujan was

Daniel Varoujan was a poet of the Ottoman Armenian world who wrote in Western Armenian, published three collections between 1906 and 1912, and left a fourth unfinished when he was arrested in 1915. He was also a schoolteacher and a school principal, which is not a footnote to the poetry: teaching was how he earned a living for most of his adult life, and the schools he taught in were the institutions that carried the literary language he was writing in.

He was born Daniel Chpugkyarian and took Varoujan as a pen name early. The birth surname is written several ways depending on which Armenian orthography and which romanisation is used — Չպուգքյարյան in the modern Eastern spelling, Չպուգքեարեան in the classical spelling his own edition of the language uses — and it reaches English as Chboukkiarian, Tchboukkiarian and other forms. None of these is the single correct version; they are the same name passing through different systems.

Almost every short account of him is organised around 1915. That is understandable and it is also a distortion, because it puts the last four months of a life in front of the nine years of work that are the reason anyone looks him up. This article takes the poetry first and reaches the arrest where the chronology reaches it.

Brgnik and the world of Sebastia

Varoujan was born on 20 April 1884 in Brgnik, a village in the district of Sebastia — Sivas in Turkish, and the administrative centre of the Ottoman province of the same name. The name of the village is also transcribed Prgnik and Perknik, which is the ordinary consequence of moving Armenian consonants into Latin script rather than a disagreement about the place.

Sebastia was one of the large Armenian population centres of the Ottoman interior, with its own schools, printing, dialect and church structures. Describing that world requires some care with terms. Armenians called this cultural geography Western Armenia, and the phrase is genuinely historical rather than a modern coinage, but it names a cultural and demographic region rather than a state or a province with those borders. Armat uses the Ottoman administrative names for places and the Armenian names for the culture, because that is what the sources do.

His father worked away from home in Constantinople, which was an ordinary pattern for men from the interior provinces and is the reason the family had a connection to the capital at all. Several popular biographies attach vivid stories to this period — an imprisoned father, a childhood shadowed by a specific atrocity — and the more dramatic of them are difficult to trace to a source. What can be said without inventing anything is that his childhood fell in the decade of the violence against Ottoman Armenians in the eighteen-nineties, that Sebastia was inside the affected region, and that his family's ability to send him to school in the capital shaped everything that followed.

Constantinople and the Mkhitarian schools

He was sent to Constantinople and educated at the Mkhitarian school at Kadıköy, on the Asian shore of the city, the district Armenians called Chalcedon. The Mkhitarists were an Armenian Catholic monastic congregation whose schools in Constantinople and Venice were among the most demanding Armenian institutions of the period, and their curriculum is the single most important fact about Varoujan's formation: it taught classical Armenian alongside the modern language, and it taught European literature in the original.

His earliest surviving literary attempts belong to these school years. His first verses were published in 1901 in a handwritten student paper, Ardzagank Motayi, which is worth stating precisely because it is the kind of detail that separates a documented chronology from a general impression of precocity.

This is also where the article has to resolve a small confusion that runs through the reference literature. Different encyclopedias name different Mkhitarian institutions for these years, and the Sakızağacı school in the European part of the city is sometimes given instead. The Armenian sources that are specific about it place his boarding-school years and his first published verse at Chalcedon, and that is the version used here.

Venice and the first collection

In 1902 he moved to the Moorat-Raphael College in Venice, the Mkhitarist school attached to the monastery on the island of San Lazzaro. San Lazzaro had been the order's centre of Armenian scholarship and printing since the eighteenth century, and a student there was inside a working philological institution rather than merely at a school abroad.

His first collection, Սարսուռներ, was printed at San Lazzaro in 1906 — a short book of about forty pages, published where he was studying. The title is usually given in English as Shivers or Tremors, and both are attempts at a word that means something closer to a physical shudder passing through the body.

Scholarship does not treat it as juvenilia to be skipped. It is the collection in which the sensory vocabulary that defines his later work is already present and not yet organised, and the distance between it and the book that followed three years later is the clearest measure of how quickly he developed.

Ghent, and what the record shows

In 1905 Varoujan entered the University of Ghent in Belgium on a scholarship, and he remained there until 1909. This is the part of his biography most often compressed into a single clause, and it is also the part where the evidence is unusually concrete: the essays gathered by the historian Simon Payaslian include archival lists of his expenses in the city, down to rent and household items, alongside the thirty-nine poems he wrote while he was there.

What he studied is stated slightly differently by different sources. The commonest description is that he followed courses in literature, sociology and economics; Western Armenian accounts often say economics and political science. These are not incompatible descriptions of a curriculum, and Armat states the range rather than choosing the version that sounds most precise.

One thing should not be asserted. The sources establish that he studied at Ghent for four years; they do not establish that he completed a degree there, and the biographies that give him one do not say on what authority. He returned to the Ottoman Empire in 1909, which is the year the record is certain about.

European reading and its traces

Four years in a Belgian university at the height of European symbolism left marks that scholars can point to in the writing rather than merely assume from the dates. The influence most often argued for in the literature is Nietzsche, whose reception in Armenian letters at the start of the twentieth century is a studied subject in its own right, and whose vocabulary of strength, vitality and self-overcoming supplied Varoujan with terms for something he was trying to say about beauty and the body.

The point of naming influences is to show them working. What Varoujan took from his European reading was not a set of opinions but a licence: permission to write a poetry of physical sensation and pre-Christian imagery in a literary language that had been used mainly for devotional, didactic and patriotic purposes. Marc Nichanian's study of the period argues that he had to invent a language to carry a pantheistic experience, and that certain parts of Nietzsche helped him do it.

Lists of movements are easy to produce and hard to defend, so this article names only what scholarship attaches to specific features of the work, and does not credit him with absorbing every current that happened to be fashionable in Europe while he was there.

Teaching, marriage and the capital

He returned in 1909 and taught for about three years in the Sebastia region, in and around the village world he had come from. In 1912 he married Araksi, and in the same period he moved to Constantinople, where he became principal of the school of St Gregory the Illuminator.

The teaching matters to the poetry in a direct way. The years he spent in the villages of the interior stand between the urban, literary first books and the agricultural material of the collection he began afterwards, and the sequence is chronological rather than sentimental: he wrote about sowing and harvest after living where sowing and harvest happened.

The four collections

Four books carry his reputation. Սարսուռներ appeared at San Lazzaro in Venice in 1906; Ցեղին սիրտը in Constantinople in 1909; Հեթանոս երգեր in Constantinople in 1912; and Հացին երգը in Constantinople in 1921, six years after his death. Everything else — occasional verse, criticism, letters, the unfinished narrative poems — sits around these.

The English titles are not settled. Հեթանոս երգեր is reliably Pagan Songs and Հացին երգը is reliably The Song of the Bread, but Սարսուռներ appears as both Shivers and Tremors, and Ցեղին սիրտը has been printed as The Heart of the Race, The Heart of the Nation and The Heart of the Tribe. Where translations differ this article says so rather than picking one and presenting it as the standard.

The second book is the one that changed his standing. Ցեղին սիրտը is a long collection built around collective history, oppression and endurance, and Armenian criticism treats it as the point at which Western Armenian poetry acquired a new register. It is also the book that has been read most ideologically, in both directions, which is why the next paragraph is about a single word in its title.

The word in the title

Ցեղ, the word in Ցեղին սիրտը, is the reason the title resists translation. In early twentieth-century Armenian literary usage it means a people, a stock, a lineage — the sense that English once carried in phrases like the English race, before the word narrowed. It is not the vocabulary of biological racial theory, and reading it that way imports a framework that postdates the poem.

The three English renderings in circulation are themselves the evidence. Race, Nation and Tribe are three attempts to catch a word that sits between them, and each loses something: race carries associations Varoujan's usage does not, nation implies a political entity that did not exist, tribe suggests something smaller and more archaic than he meant.

Armat therefore prints the Armenian title, gives the renderings that exist, and explains the difficulty rather than resolving it silently. This is not a defensive footnote; it is the accurate description of a translation problem that any serious reader of the book will meet.

Pagan Songs and poetic paganism

Հեթանոս երգեր, published in 1912, is his most influential book and the one most often misdescribed. Its poems draw on pre-Christian imagery, on classical and Near Eastern antiquity, and on the physical world — bodies, light, heat, appetite, strength — and they treat beauty and vitality as subjects worth a poem on their own terms rather than as illustrations of a moral.

The paganism is a literary and aesthetic programme, not a religious conversion. Varoujan did not renounce Christianity or attempt to revive an ancient cult, and nothing in the record suggests he wanted to. He used what he called poetic paganism as a way of reaching a register the Armenian literary tradition had largely reserved against: sensual, physical, unembarrassed by the body, and interested in force as a source of beauty rather than a moral problem.

The distinction is worth stating plainly because a modern Armenian religious movement, Hetanism, does exist and does revive pre-Christian worship, and it was founded in the nineteen-nineties, generations after Varoujan died. The shared vocabulary is a coincidence of translation and not a line of descent.

Mehean and cultural renewal

In 1914 Varoujan joined four other writers — Gostan Zarian, Hagop Oshagan, Kegham Parseghian and Aharon Dadourian — in founding Mehean, a literary group and monthly review in Constantinople. The name means a pagan temple, which tells you what the group thought it was doing: building a centre, a temple of art, for a culture its founders described as scattered.

Its manifesto announced the worship and the expression of the Armenian spirit, and argued that without that spirit there is no Armenian literature and no Armenian artist. Varoujan's role in producing it is documented rather than assumed: by Zarian's own account Zarian drafted most of the text in French and Varoujan completed it and translated it into Armenian.

It should not be inflated. Mehean ran for a matter of months in 1914, produced a small run of issues, and dissolved amid disagreements among its founders — Varoujan himself withdrew before the end. Its importance is real but it is the importance of a programme stated at the right moment, not of an institution with a long life, and the group is easier to describe as a nationalist literary circle than that description deserves. Its argument was about artistic autonomy and cultural self-definition at least as much as about the nation.

The Song of the Bread

Հացին երգը is the book he was writing when he was arrested, and it is the one most readers meet first. It follows the agricultural year — ploughing, sowing, harvest, threshing, the mill, the oven — and treats each stage as a subject worthy of formal poetry, with the labour and the bodies of the people doing it kept in the frame rather than tidied out of it.

What makes it more than a pastoral cycle is that the dignity is located in the work itself. The land is not scenery and the villagers are not types; the poems are about effort, about the transformation of grain into bread through human labour, and about the physical world as something that yields to and rewards that effort. It is the same interest in the body and in strength that runs through Հեթանոս երգեր, moved from myth to the field.

The book was unfinished when he died, and the published version is the manuscript as it stood, not a completed design. Armat has an article on lavash, and the temptation to link the two is worth naming and refusing: a literary symbol of bread and a flatbread tradition are not the same subject, and a reader sent from one to the other would learn nothing about either.

Western Armenian as a literary language

Varoujan wrote in Western Armenian, and this is not a detail of spelling. Western and Eastern Armenian are two standard forms of the same language, each with its own pronunciation, verb system and vocabulary, and by Varoujan's lifetime each had its own literature, press, schools and readership. Western Armenian was the language of the Ottoman Armenian world; Eastern Armenian was the language of the Russian Caucasus.

His contribution to it was to enlarge what it could do. Scholarship on the Mehean circle describes the aestheticisation of the Western Armenian literary language as one of the group's explicit aims, and Varoujan's poetry as its clearest demonstration: he wrote a dense, sensuous, highly coloured Armenian at a moment when the standard was still being formed, and much of what later writers could do in the language they could do because he had shown it was possible.

The contrast that makes this legible is with the other branch. Hovhannes Tumanyan was writing in Eastern Armenian in exactly the same years and toward exactly the opposite ideal — plainness, the cadence of speech, the folk tale — and the two of them mark the range of what Armenian poetry was doing in a single decade. Armenian scholarship has compared their views of language directly. Within a few years one tradition would lose its territory and most of its readers, and that asymmetry is the reason the two names are not equally famous today.

Arrest, deportation and death

On 24 April 1915 Varoujan was arrested at his home in Constantinople and his papers were confiscated. He was one of several hundred Armenian writers, editors, clergy, teachers and community leaders seized in the capital that night and over the following days, in the operation that removed the intellectual leadership of the Ottoman Armenian community at the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. That date is now commemorated as the beginning of the genocide, and it is the date of the arrests, not of his death.

He was deported inland and held for about four months at Çankırı, in the province of Kastamonu. On 26 August 1915 he was killed, together with four other detainees, while being moved from Çankırı toward Ankara; the memoir of Grigoris Balakian, who was held in the same group and survived, is the source for the location and the circumstances. He was thirty-one.

Armat states this and does not illustrate it. Detailed eyewitness accounts of how he and the men with him died exist and are reproduced widely, sometimes for no reason beyond their capacity to shock. They are not necessary to understand either the history or the poetry, and this is a biography of a writer.

What was lost, and what survived

The loss was not only of a man. Ruben Sevak, another Western Armenian poet, was killed with him; Kegham Parseghian of the Mehean group was killed the same year. The Ottoman Armenian literary world had its writers, its editors and its readership destroyed within a few years of each other, and Western Armenian went from being the everyday language of a large population with its own presses and schools to being a diaspora language, which is what it remains.

Հացին երգը survived that. The manuscript was confiscated at his arrest, and it reached print in Constantinople in 1921. How it got from one to the other is genuinely unclear: the version repeated almost everywhere is that it was recovered by bribing Ottoman officials, and this account circulates without a named source or a named intermediary. Armat records it as the tradition it is rather than retelling it as an established fact, and notes that the book exists, which is the part nobody disputes.

His reputation since has been continuous and slightly divided. Soviet Armenian scholarship canonised him, but read him through categories of social protest and national liberation that fit some of the work and flatten the rest; the emphasis on beauty, on labour and on the body that runs through the last two books does not reduce to politics. Later criticism, including work that reads him alongside Yeghishe Charents, has been recovering the parts the earlier framework had little use for.