Khachatur Abovian §

Khachatur Abovian is conventionally treated as the father of modern Eastern Armenian literature because he wrote in the living vernacular rather than the classical written language alone. His novel "Wounds of Armenia", completed in 1841 and published posthumously, transformed the Russo-Persian wars and the fall of Erivan into a national awakening narrative. Abovian welcomed Russian rule as an escape from khanate domination, a position that later Armenian writers would both inherit and complicate. His disappearance in 1848 gave his biography a mythic quality, but his historical importance is literary and political: he made Eastern Armenian speech a vehicle for modern national feeling. In the atlas he sits at the beginning of the cultural chain that runs through Nalbandian, Raffi, Tumanyan and the revolutionary generation that founded mass parties.