Published in 2003, Yeghishe Charents: Poet of the Revolution edited by Marc Nichanian is a collection of essays from the first international conference about a modern Armenian poet, Charents, held at a Western university.
Of note to this library are the essays The Armenian Counterculture That Never Was and Charents the Prophet by James R. Russell.
In these essays, Russell explores Charents’ sexuality in the context of the age he lived in, the evolution of his aesthetic, and how ahead of his time he was. Born in 1897, Charents was a poet, writer and activist. He is one of the most celebrated Armenian poets of all time.
Russell is the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a part-time Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Biblical Hebrew at California State University, Fresno.
He has authored over one hundred scholarly articles, many of which have been collected in his Armenian and Iranian Studies. He is most recently the author of a study on and translation of the collected poems of Bedros Tourian entitled Bosphorus Nights.
Charents’ literary subject matter ranged from his experiences in the First World War, socialist revolution, and frequently Armenia and Armenians. He is recognized as “the main poet of the 20th century” in Armenia.
Charents was bisexual. His homoerotic verses come from the latter part of his life, when he was also turning, unabashedly, the past and to religiosity.
“Charents the Prophet” by James R. Russell in Yeghishe Charents: Poet of the Revolution
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As a boy, the poet Gevorg Emin knew Yeghishe Charents. He eventually would come into possession of a series of Charents’ manuscripts. Fearing his own arrest, Charents hid the manuscripts during the Great Purge of 1937. He was arrested and eventually murdered by Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Decades later, Emin gave James R. Russell, the author of these essays, copies of the manuscripts. Russell translated and published a number of Charents’ homoerotic poems.
His way of life — his mystical religious fervor, his fascination with the Buddha and Freud, his unapologetic homosexual impulses, his drug-taking, his howling rage against the manifold repressions of his time — all are a foretaste of the cultural movement that was to being in American in the 1950’s with the Beat generation
James R. Russell, “The Armenian Counterculture That Never Was”
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ISBN: 1-56859-112-8. Published by Mazda Publishers, Inc.
