Arandzar (1877-1913)

[Eddie]

Arandzar - another forgotten value

 

Here a little reworked item that I am reworking again for Groong

 

I would wager that hardly anyone has heard the name of short story writer Arandzar. He real name was Missak Kouyoumjian. He was born in 1877 in western Armenia and died in Adana in 1913. I am even more strongly convinced that the percentage of those who have read his enjoyable short stories is even smaller than those who may have seen or heard his name.

 

This is a very great pity indeed for it is a fact that a good writer need not be honored with labels such as 'genius', 'talented', 'brilliant', and so on and so forth to be readable beyond their day. Such is the case with Arandzar whose famous short story 'The Laughter of Misery' that depicted an episode of mass human suffering during the bloody devastation of Armenia by Leng Timour was featured in many a literary anthology.

 

Arandzar however perhaps deserves greater remembrance and not just in Armenian but in international literature for his story 'From the Gallows to the Wedding' that contains one of the earliest references in international fiction to the manner in which technological advance would be put to the use of mass, scientifically organized slaughter:

 

'Our modern civilization’ he writes ‘along with lots of other things has also made the business of massacre that much easier. From within his four walls, the electric cable, like death's unseen hand, within a split second will communicate orders from the chief executioner. And almost immediately, at a moment of least expectation his victims are bloodied and laid low. Villages and towns that were standing at dawn do not witness dusk. Thanks to knowledge, new discoveries will in the future even further perfect this system. But let me not stray to far....'

 

Arandzar wrote little. But some of what he wrote offer excellent insight into Armenian life in Istanbul and Ottoman occupied western Armenia prior to the genocide, covering in fact the period up to about 1907-1908. With endearing wit and charm he creates warm and living characters for whom we cannot fail to have sympathy. They are ordinary mortals like you and me attempting to live their lives as best they can. Yet at each step their life becomes a misery or a nightmare, a terror or a death, for they live as an oppressed group within the Ottoman Empire. They exist as second class citizens, discriminated, regarded as inferior and treated unequally, with contempt and humiliated as a matter of course. Arandzar really brings to light how men and women must have felt at being so treated.

 

Though heavy with the burden of oppression Arandzar’s stories gain by the absence of any sentimental nationalism or declamatory patriotism. So he enables us to feel the plight of an oppressed person that much more acutely. We hear not the ringing slogan but the cry of pain. ‘My Cotton Trade’ further enhances his reputation. Besides its vivid detailing of the corruption of the Ottoman state apparatus from the top to the remotest provinces it registers episodes of the 1895-96 massacres showing in particular the manner in which the Armenian trading and merchant class was targeted. Here a vital record of the overarching Ottoman strategy to blight Armenian economic development in historic Armenia.

 

Giving Arandzar’s writing the quality of art is his humour, his capacity for telling a story, his clarity of language and most of all the vitality of his characters, underlined by focus on a critical particular or by a phrase that is expressive of the type of character represented. With a single sentence he summarizes the camel like patience of the Armenian shopkeeper noting in 'The Beard Brush' that 'every patience has its limit, they say, even that of a shop keeper, and that of an Armenian shopkeeper as well.'

 

Deploying his sharp wit Arandzar also takes steady, humorous and accurate swipes at the mediocre Armenian intelligentsia and artist in Istanbul. His ‘Short Story of Short Stories’ is literary criticism in the form of fiction disposing of that segment of Armenian literature that artificially aped and copied French samplings and produced tripe that was then duplicated and triplicate. He also targeted the press of the time that encouraged and gave a platform such mediocrity. His barbs hit too at the pretentious, self-flattering but socially useless young intelligentsia that whilst in Europe postured as students but lived lives of egotistical hedonism swindling charities for the expense. He ridicules their pretentious pompous language adorned by countless borrowings from the French designed to cover vacuity with phraseology that is incomprehensible. How very reminiscent of our modern intelligentsia!

 

If you have the opportunity, read this fellow. Pity that he wrote so little and gave up the art well before his early death at 36.

 

Eddie Arnavoudian

13 May 2010