Gostan Zarian

The genre in which he excelled, however, was the diary form with long autobiographical divagations, reminiscences and impressions of people and places, interspersed with literary, philosophical and historical meditations and polemics.

His father, Christopher Yeghiazarov, was a prosperous general in the Russian Army, "a strong man, profoundly Christian and Armenian," who spent most of his life fighting in the mountains of the Caucasus.

After 1909, he was a political exile in Europe, as the tsarist government had reportedly banned his return to the Caucasus because of his revolutionary activities, for which he spent a year and a half in a German jail (1907–08).

[1] In 1914, together with Daniel Varoujan, Hagop Oshagan, Kegham Parseghian, and Aharon Dadourian [hy], he founded the literary periodical Mehian, which means pagan temple in Armenian.

This constellation of young firebrands became known as the Mehian writers, and like their contemporaries in Europe—the French surrealists, Italian futurists, and German expressionists—they defied the establishment, fighting against ossified traditions and preparing the way for the new.

We were close to victory..." The tone of the publications in Mehian was politically, aesthetically and religiously radical, with a strong influence from German philology—with Zarian specifically advocating an anti-Semitic idea that was present in many of his later works of fiction: that Armenians were an Aryan people who needed to overcome the Semite within themselves.

He returned to Constantinople in late 1921 and there, together with Vahan Tekeyan, Hagop Oshagan, Schahan Berberian, and Kegham Kavafian, he founded another literary periodical, Partsravank (Monastery-on-a-Hill), in 1922.

His own task was no longer to reject, to criticize, to whine—but in the deepest sense of the word, to submerge in the swift currents of history and to give their impulse direction and form.

(He's sixty-three) He scales a mountain like a wild chamois Despite a certain—bulk—avoirdupois And swears Per Baccho loud as any peasant: Together we've enjoyed a very pleasant Month of mad cookery and writing talk, Such food, such wine—a wonder we can walk.