Yeghishe Charents §

Born Yeghishe Soghomonyan in Kars in 1897; volunteered with Russian forces on the Van front in 1915 and the Red Army in 1918–19, an experience that fed his early modernist long poems "Dantesque Legend" and the futurist "Soma". The single most important Armenian poet of the Soviet 1920s and early 1930s, he reshaped Armenian poetic language through Russian and European modernism while drawing on the medieval lyric tradition of Sayat-Nova and Naghash Hovnatan. His 1933 collection "Book of the Way" (Girk chanaparhi) contained the now-famous acrostic "O Armenian people, your only salvation lies in your collective strength", read as cryptic resistance to Stalinist Russification. Arrested by the NKVD in July 1937 during the Yezhovshchina; died in custody in Yerevan on 27 November 1937, officially of heart failure. Posthumously rehabilitated in 1954; the Charents House-Museum on Mashtots Avenue in Yerevan preserves his manuscripts and the rooms in which he was arrested.