Yeghishe Charents

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yeghishe Charents

Yeghishe Charents (Armenian: Եղիշե Չարենց, born Yeghishe Abgari Soghomonian) (March 13, 1897, Kars - November 27, 1937, Yerevan) was an Armenian poet and public activist executed in Stalin's purges.

From 1904 to 1912 he received his education in Kars, then part of the Russian Empire. Amid the upheavals of the First World War and the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, he volunteered in 1915 for the Caucasian Front. In 1917 to 1918 he was in Erzurum during the bitter fighting. Some of his experiences would later appear in his poetry. In 1918-1919 he participated in the Red Army^[1]. He translated "The Internationale" into Armenian.

His last collection of poems, "The Book of The Way", was printed in 1933, but its distribution was delayed by the Soviet government until 1934, when it was reissued with some revisions. In this book the authors lays out the panorama of Armenian history and reviews it part-by-part.

He had two daughters Arpenik and Anahit.

A victim of Stalinism, he died in prison. He was rehabilitated in 1954 after Stalin's death.

His works were translated by Valeri Bryusov, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Louis Aragon and others.

His home at No. 17, Mashtots Avenue in Yerevan was turned into a museum in 1975. Armenian city Charentsavan is named after him.