Role: Author

Kara-Darvish (Hakob Genjian) was an Armenian Futurist poet who lived and worked mainly in Tiflis, Georgia, before and after World War I. He wrote several novels and manifestoes, but is best known for the “postcard” poems he distributed at cafés and outside cinemas which proclaim his cosmopolitan and revolutionary credo and experiment with odd typefaces and experiment with incantatory nonsense words in Armenian, dipping also into the Armenian mythological past. (His Russian Futurist colleagues named this technique zaum’, i.e., transrational language.) Among his friends and associates were the poets Osip Mandelstam and Yeghishe Charents. Kostan Zarian evokes the poet and his turbulent surroundings in the novel Nave Leran Vra (The Ship upon the Mountain).

Karapet Sital, a native of Kasht, set down the epic in a unique and rare volume, recasting it as an anti-fascist allegory. The full text is presented here, with an annotated translation and philological study by Prof. James Russell of Harvard University.

Judith Claire Mitchell is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of a James Michener/Copernicus Society of America Fellowship. She was a James C. McCreight Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin. She lives in Madison.

JULIEN ZARIFIAN is Professor in U.S. History and Civilization at the University of Poitiers, France, and fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. He is the author of two books in French and has published dozens of academic articles in journals such as Society and European Journal of American Studies.