Vrtannes Papazian

[Eddie]

After another extended absence here a little note on Vrtanness Papazian...Ah what we lose as a result of ignorance of or because of willfully ignoring our own history and culture...

 

Vrtanness Papazian (1866-1920) is another significant short story writer whose reputation has been cut short by reckless critics. A fine narrator, at once humorous and cutting, he has an artist’s feel for 19th century Armenian rural life whose class divisions, class exploitation and national oppression he describes in grippingly dramatic development. Grasping human relations in natural and authentic flow Papazian adequately compensates for sometimes flat and inauthentic characterization that can turn protagonists into incomprehensible strangers.

 

The imperial Ottomans state, its courts, tax collectors and the string of sub-collectors with rights acquired to a portion of the peasants’ product appear in all their brutality, some plundering hand in hand with Armenian usurers.

‘The Armenian usurer indeed was more terrifying than any Kurdish bandit. Armed with debtor’s notes more deadly than Kurdish swords they seize and plunder and then laugh at the beggars they leave behind. Their brazenness reaches disgusting heights when in lieu of interest they demand beautiful women or village brides for a few days.’

 

A visible thread in many a story is contempt for the Church and its priests preaching passivity in the face of family homes burnt out, men murdered, women raped and children abducted.

 

‘Fair Judgment’, with its depictions of gruesome, ghastly dirt, with the mud, the grime, the urine and excrement, the dankness and the darkness of Ottoman jail cells, with descriptions of worn threadbare courthouse curtains behind which preside ‘yawning judges ready to fall asleep’, features as metaphor for the nightmare that passed for Ottoman justice. Here Papazian reminds one of Aranstar but with a difference. Arantsar also sketches the corruption of the Ottoman judicial apparatus. He does so convincingly, but through the prism of Armenian experience alone. Papazian gives these same truths enhanced authority focusing them through wider lens’ that take in besides Christians also Muslims, besides Armenians also Albanians, Arabs, Jews, Kurds and Greeks all also trapped in the fatal claws of Ottoman ‘justice’.

 

‘Monastic Yergo, with passages that remind one of Hrant’s ‘Letters on the Lives of Emigrants’, offers a telling analysis of the processes that drove tens of thousands of Armenians from their homelands in Van, Mush, Erzerum and elsewhere. Flooding into Istanbul’s ghettos they nourished hopes that money earned would repay voracious usurers threatening their families’ back home. Hopes alas are dashed with pittance earnings driving impoverished emigrants to despair and drink while their families at home suffer abuse and expropriation at the hands of usurers enjoying the solidarity of Ottoman ‘law’.

 

Papazian’s worth is evident even in flawed stores. ‘Santo – from the Lives of Armenian Gypsies’, is a gripping tale and an invaluable record of a forgotten phenomenon of Armenian society, of those ‘tens of thousands’ of Armenian gypsies who traveled ‘through every (Armenian) village and every town selling goods prepared during the winter’ and who like gypsies the world over were labeled ‘shameless thieves difficult to do business with’ (p563). Set during the 1895-96 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire when Armenian gypsy communities where also drawn into the nightmare of genocidal repression we meet the fiery Margo, whose traveling caravan is confronted by Turkish officials and she raped. Seething, she is humiliated further by a husband who having failed to defend her then turns traitor.

 

In the figure of Margo who eventually avenges herself and her community, ‘Santo’ highlights the independence, the force and decisiveness of women and their central and sometimes dominant role in family and community life and in relations with outsiders. It was women ‘who organized meetings’ and ‘forced men to attend and to think’ about how to respond to critical situations.

‘It would be mainly women who did the trading…as well as the fortune telling and the begging, shocking one with their brazenness but also causing wonder at their moral rectitude, at the ease with which they dispersed and got rid of those who dared approach them with ill intent. (p556)

 

Moments of scratching prose are easily exonerated in what remains both a dramatic human tale of a woman who passes into legend for her struggle against marauding Ottoman officials and soldiers. The story is also a veritable sociological mine on the life of Armenian gypsies, their internal democratic life, their role in wider Armenian community, how they earned their living, their marriage rituals and much else.

 

In one of his apparently more generous moods, retreating from his normally caustic dismissal of Armenian prose writers, Oshagan in the same breath speaks of Vrtanness Papazian and of Maupassan, the unquestionably superb exponent of the short story. Whatever the value or validity of such comparisons, being offered by the wantonly ultra-critical Oshagan, they speak to the quality of Papazian as writer and artist.

 

31 May 31, 2012