Sero Khanzadyan §

Soviet Armenian novelist and essayist, born in Goris (Syunik) in 1915. Best known for historical novels with Karabakh and Syunik settings, including Mkhitar Sparapet (1961) on the 18th-century Armenian armed self-defence under David Bek and Mkhitar. His Soviet-era body of work is one of the principal Armenian-language vehicles for the post-1960s reopening of 1905-cycle and Karabakh-historical themes inside the constraints of Soviet historiography. In 1988 he wrote a widely-circulated open letter to Mikhail Gorbachev arguing the Armenian historical case for the unification of Nagorno-Karabakh with the Armenian SSR; the letter was one of the early-period Armenian intellectual interventions of the modern Karabakh question. Died in 1998.