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June 10, 2014
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Re-Considering Zabel Yessayan, an Extraordinary Armenian Literary Figure
By Florence Avakian
Recognized as one of the leading Western Armenian writers, educators, and
social activists, Zabel Yessayan and her prolific literary output are little
known to readers of English. On Tuesday, May 6, the Krikor and Clara Zohrab
Information Center of the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America
(Eastern), presented a fascinating talk on Yessayan’s life and works by
translator, essayist, and Columbia University master’s degree student
Jennifer Manoukian.
Introduced by the Very Rev. Fr. Daniel Findikyan, director of the Zohrab
Center, the speaker took her audience on a journey to 1878 Constantinople
and the Armenian district of Uskudar, where Yessayan was born and lived
until age 17. It was a unique neighborhood shared by Greek, Turkish, and
Jewish families.
“This close proximity to other groups and nationalities helped to shape a
belief in tolerance and humanism that would define her writing and activism
later in life,” noted Manoukian.
During her formative years, her most fundamental relationship was with her
father, a drifter in business ventures, “but to Zabel no one was wiser or
more worthy of respect. He encouraged her to become a writer, to read
widely, and instilled in her a love of knowledge.” His progressive views on
women’s rights and women’s education had a powerful effect on his daughter,
whom he encouraged “to not let anything prevent her from doing what she
wanted with her life.”
Already a fixture in literary salons at age 17, Zabel wrote a short story
called “Feminine Souls” in the anthology, My Soul in Exile, which displayed
her “resistance to the social restrictions placed on women, and her search
for an identity outside of [the role of] wife and mother normally prescribed
to women,” the speaker said.
“Carve Out a Place For Yourself”
By 1895 Zabel’s father, deeply concerned for her future, as well as the
impending massacres against intellectuals, decided to send her to Paris for
her safety. Before she left, she visited the first Armenian female novelist,
Serpouhi Dussap, who wrote about the struggles of Armenian women. Dussap
warned Zabel: “A male writer is free to be mediocre. A woman writer is not.
Carve out a place for yourself in society.”
Arriving in Paris in 1895, Zabel was one of the first Armenian women to
study abroad. Fluent in both Armenian and French, she began publishing in
both languages, and studied literature, philosophy, and history at the
Sorbonne, while living a modest life in the Latin Quarter. Cultivating
relationships with French literary figures, she introduced Armenian
literature to the French public through translations, reviews, and original
work.
It was in Paris that she met an Armenian art student from Constantinople,
Dikran Yessayan. They married in 1900, and had two children: Sophie (born
1901) and Hrant (born 1910). In 1902 the couple with their one-year-old
daughter moved back to Constantinople, where Zabel had no trouble
reintegrating into community life. Dikran found it difficult, however, and
returned to Paris permanently in 1905.
During the period between 1902 and 1915, Zabel traveled often between
Constantinople and Paris, and wrote extensively, producing a number of
novels, novellas, and journalistic works about the specific experiences of
women in Armenian society. She tackled social injustice topics not addressed
by other women writers, whom she called “frivolous.” Her subjects included
struggles faced by Armenian school teachers in Constantinople, the role of
Armenian women after the 1908 revolution, as well as her student years in
Paris.
Taking advantage of the optimistic feeling after the 1908 overthrow of the
sultan, Zabel began plans to create an Armenian high school for girls in
Constantinople and organized a movement to train women teachers in Armenian
schools in Anatolia. These plans abruptly ended in the summer of 1909 when
she went with a Patriarchal delegation to Cilicia to document the massacres
of a few months earlier, and report on the state of the surviving widows and
orphans. She worked diligently to prevent the orphans from being taken away
from their homeland, and also to prevent them from being entrusted to
foreign groups, including European, American, and Turkish institutions, “in
order to prevent their assimilation and the loss of their Armenian
identity.”
In a heated argument with Jemal Pasha, she fought desperately, but failed
due to lack of support from Armenian organizations, to prevent the use of
Turkish by Armenian orphans in Ottoman orphanages set up by the government.
She continued the fight after leaving Cilicia, and wrote a book on this
episode called, Averagneroun Metch (“Amid the Ruins”), considered by many to
be her masterpiece.
Intimate Experiences of Women
Zabel’s life in Constantinople from 1911 to 1915 was devoted to writing
novels focusing on the intimate experiences of women, “told from the
perspective of female characters that were at their core, in search of human
truth that all novelists seek to find. These themes had never before been
written [about] in Western Armenian, and haven’t been written since,”
Jennifer Manoukian said.
With the onset of the Genocide in 1915, Zabel was one of the intellectuals
on the government list to be rounded up on April 24. She managed to hide in
a hospital disguised as a Turkish woman, then escaped to Bulgaria, but was
forced to leave her son and mother behind. After two months in Bulgaria, she
fled to the Caucasus, spending the next two years in Baku and Tiflis. There
she assisted Armenian orphans and refugees, and published their eyewitness
reports in many periodicals.
In 1919, Zabel moved back to France, and wrote furiously, but lived hand to
mouth. During this time, her writing also veered in a new direction,
focusing on exile and its influence on art. By the mid 1920s, she
unexpectedly became an unofficial spokesperson of Soviet Armenia in the
diaspora. After a 1926 trip to Soviet Armenia, she became the editor of a
pro-Soviet journal in France, designed to entice diasporan Armenians to move
to Soviet Armenia. She finally settled in Armenia in 1933.
“Zabel had a very bleak outlook on the future of Armenian art in the
diaspora, which is a theme she delves into in My Soul in Exile,” related
Manoukian. For Zabel, “the best way to contribute to the Armenian nation was
to be in Armenia: taking an active role in the socialist reconstruction of
the country.”
>From 1933 until her imprisonment and eventual disappearance in 1937 during
Stalin’s purges, “she seemed to be at her happiest,” living near her son and
daughter, teaching classes in French literature at Yerevan State University,
and again writing prolifically. It was at this time that Zabel wrote The
Gardens of Silihdar, intended to be the first in a three-volume
autobiography.
“The book is often celebrated as one of her most beautiful works,” Jennifer
Manoukian said, “in part because of its magnificent imagery and the way she
brings the characters of her childhood to life.”
Following an enthusiastic Q-and-A session, copies of Zabel Yessayan’s books,
The Gardens of Silihdar and My Soul in Exile, were sold out in minutes, and
discussions among the audience members continued during the reception.
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