Հրանտ Ասատուրը գրականութեան տեսաբան եւ պատմաբան
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1997
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Though Hrant Assadour, the renouned Armenian writer, grammarian, literary essayist, and publicist is quite well known to his contempories and to some of the later generations, great is the number of those who in fact have no idea of the real greatness of the man he was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in 1862 he died in 1928. Besides being a famous jurist and professor of law and jurisprudence in the Ottoman Empire, he was also the first historian of the Armenian literature. Yet, in-spite of this fact, he was never appreciated as such, because few of his contemporaries and of those of later generations knew of the existence of the unpublished manuscript which he called History of Modern Armenian Literature. This latter manuscript and many other unpublished material are now deposited at the Archives of the Yeghishe Charentz Museum of Literature and Art.
After presenting a general survey of Assadour's life and work, the article published here makes an appraisal at length of the different terminology used in the history of literature as given and analyzed by Assadour, of these the great essayist of Armenian literature discusses what poetry, prose and drama are, and then proceeds to the discussion of the subdivision of these three major categories of literature.
Thus, just to mention a few of the offshoots of poetry, Assadour analyzes and presents what the orhnerg (canticle), geghon (ballad), yeghererg (elegy), yerg (song). sharakan (hymn), gandz (canzone), meghedi (melisma), ketsort (anthem, coda), du-Baznergoutioun (epic) are.
After discussing the Portraits, another manuscript of Assadour, of which certain sections are published in the periodicals of the time, Hakobian delves deep into the analysis of the unpublished manuscript of History of Modern Armenian Literature, makes a minute and critical presentation of its content, and evaluates the work as such. According to Hakobian's findings, the History is divided into four major sections. Of these the author of the article discusses the second (first prose and poetry expressions in the Armenian vernacular), the third (dialects of the Armenian language), and the fourth (secular literature of Western Armenians) sections, the last being divided into two major parts; the pre-1846 and post-1846; of which the latter discusses and presents the Armenian writers and men of letter of Constantinople,
Assadour's History comprises of 125 distinct chapters of which 117 are dedicated to the presentation of writers, poets, men of letter, editors, and publishers and cover a period of about five centuries. At the end of the article Hakobian hurries to attach a number of annexes. After giving the table of contents of the History, Hakobian presents a bunch of essays from the content of Assadour's manuscript, these latter bear on the life and work of Andreas Papazian (b. 1806) who played a great role in the vernacular translation of the Bible, Ghoukas Paltazarian (b. 1810) and the Arshalouys bi-monthly of Smyrna, Janik Aramian (b. 1820), the Armenian writer, editor and publisher, and Mesrop Nouparian (b. 1812), the Armenian linguist and lexicographer, whose various French-Armenian and Armenian-French dictionaries not only helped create new Armenian words and terms but also are in use even at the present as a fundamental source of authority.
The article presented here is a rightful hommage to the great man of letters, grammarian, biographer, publicist, editor, writer and the historian of Armenian literature Hrant Assadour was.
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Յակոբեան, «Հրանտ Ասատուրը գրականութեան տեսաբան եւ պատմաբան», «Հայկազեան հայագիտական հանդէս», 1997, Պէյրութ, էջ 393-422