His career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty, but he gained lasting renown for his highly personal and innovative lyric poetry.

Tourian wrote poems on themes of patriotism, unrequited love, premature death, nature, and sentiments of loneliness and hopelessness.

His poems have been praised for their freedom from convention, their spontaneousness, and for bringing the individual's deep emotions and psychology back into Armenian poetry.

[5] He attended the Armenian academy (jemaran) in Scutari, where he was taught by the satirist Hagop Baronian[3] and the playwright Srabion Tghlian.

[8] Tourian wrote his first poem at the age of thirteen[b] and his first play, a partly sung[7] pastoral melodrama titled Vart yev Shushan gam hovivk Masyats (Rose and Lily or the shepherds of Ararat, 1867),[9] at fifteen.

Before graduating from school, he was briefly sent by his family to become a pharmacist's student, but he remained in this role for only two days before returning to the academy to continue his education.

Against the wishes of his parents and relatives, he continued his activities in the world of theater, translating plays and writing his own, some of which were performed and brought him fame, but only negligible remuneration.

He also became an assistant of the editor of the Armenian newspaper Orakir dziln Avarayrvo (Sprout of Avarayr daily), where he published some articles and poems under his real name or a pen name for small sums of money.

The highly sensitive Tourian was deeply affected by the hardships of poverty, mockery by relatives and others, and rejection by women.

[13] After the success of this play, he wrote several more: Angumn Arshagunyats harsdutyan (The fall of the Arshakuni dynasty, 1870), Asbadagutyunk Parsgats i Hays gam gordzanumn Ani mayrakaghakin Pakradunyats (Persian invasions of Armenia or the destruction of Ani, capital of the Bagratunis, staged in 1908), Gordzanumn Hrovma ishkhanutyan (The destruction of Roman rule, 1870), Shushanig, Dikran II (Tigranes II), and Tadron gam tshvarner (Theater or the wretched, 1878).

Tadron gam tshvarner is a social drama about inequality in contemporary Armenian life, the protagonist of which is thought to be a self-insertion by Tourian.

These fragments were kept for many years at the Charents Museum of Literature and Arts in Yerevan and were used by anthropologist Andranik Chagharian to reconstruct Tourian's likeness.

Of the writings he produced in his short life, only 41 poems, fifteen letters, seven plays, nine articles and one eulogy by Tourian are known to have survived.

[22][d] Tourian wrote poems on themes of patriotism, unrequited love, premature death, nature, and sentiments of loneliness and hopelessness.

[25] The themes of premature death and the injustice of life appear in Tourian's first known poem, which he wrote at the age of thirteen, long before he contracted tuberculosis.

[26] Two of his most popular works are "Ljag" (Little Lake), which alludes to his approaching death[24] and complains of the indifference and inhumanity of the world,[25] and "Trkuhin" (The Turkish Woman), which is about unrequited love.

[24] In one of his last poems, "Drdunchk" (Grievance), Tourian laments that he will be unable to fulfill his desire to enjoy life and rails against God.

[29] Kevork Bardakjian writes that Tourian's poetry has some technical shortcomings but benefits from its freedom from the restrictions of convention, making it "innovative and splendidly spontaneous."

[30] Albert Sharurian calls Tourian the "first great love poet of modern Armenian lyric poetry."

His earlier plays display the influence of classicism, although he later abandoned classicist conventions and moved in the direction of romantic drama.