Zabel Yesayan was an Armenian novelist, translator, and professor of literature.
Biography
Zabel Yesayan was born on the night of February 4, 1878 as Zabel Hovhannessian, daughter of Mkrtich Hovhannessian in the Silahdar neighborhood of Scutari, Istanbul, during the height of the Russo-Turkish War. The house she was born into was a reddish, two-story wooden structure. She attended Holy Cross elementary school. In 1895 she moved to Paris, where she studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France. Inspired by the French Romantic movement and the nineteenth-century revival of Armenian Literature in the Western Armenian dialect, she began what would become a prolific writing career. Her first prose poem appeared in Arshak Chobanian's periodical Tsaghik in 1895. She went on to publish short stories, literary essays, articles, and translations in such periodicals as Mercure de France, L'Humanité, Massis, Anahit, and Arevelian Mamoul. While in Paris, she married the painter Dickran Yesayan. They had two children, Sophie and Hrant. Like Mari Beyleryan, Yesayan only returned to Istanbul after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. In 1909 she went to Cilicia and published a series of articles in connection with the Adana massacres. The tragic fate of the Armenians in Cilicia is also the subject of her book Among the Ruins, the novella The Curse, and the short stories "Safieh", and "The New Bride". Yesayan was the only woman on the list of Armenian intellectuals targeted for arrest and deportation by the Ottoman Young Turk government on April 24, 1915. She was able to evade arrest and flee to Bulgaria and then to the Caucasus, where she worked with refugees documenting their eyewitness accounts of atrocities that had taken place during the Armenian Genocide. 1918 found her in the Middle East organizing the relocation of refugees and orphans. To this period belong the novellas The Last Cup, and My Soul in Exile, where she exposes the many injustices she witnessed. Her support of Soviet Armenia was wholehearted, and in the novelRetreating Forces she describes the social and political conditions of her time. She visited Soviet Armenia in 1926 and shortly thereafter published her impressions in Prometheus Unchained. In 1933 she decided to settle in Soviet Armenia with her children, and in 1934 she took part in the first Soviet Writers' Union congress in Moscow. She taught French and Armenian literature at Yerevan State University and continued to write prolifically. To this period belong the novella Shirt of Fire, and her autobiographical book The Gardens of Silihdar. During the Great Purge she was abruptly accused of "nationalism" and arrested in 1937. She died in unknown circumstances: there is speculation that she was drowned and died in exile, possibly in Siberia, sometime in 1943. Both the Soviet Concise Literary Encyclopedia and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia state Yerevan, 1937, as the place and date of her death. Lara Aharonian, founder of the Women's Resource Center of Armenia, and Talin Suciyan, Yerevan correspondent for the Turkish Armenian newspaper Agos directed a documentary film about her titled Finding Zabel Yesayan. It was released in collaboration with Utopiana and premiered on March 7, 2009. A street in Paris was renamed after Yesayan on 8 March 2018 during International Women's Day.
Posthumous publications
According to the Armenian International Women's Association, several of Yesayan's works were published in the literary journalPangaryus as part of AIWA's series called Treasury of Armenian Women's Literature. The materials were selected from the three volumes of Yesayan's work which have been translated into English. The works published included My home, an excerpt taken from Yesayan's memoir titled The Gardens of Silihdar; Yesayan's eyewitness account of the Adana massacre of 1909, titled In the Ruins; and a mystery story called The Man, which had previously been published in a collection called My Soul in Exile and Other Writings.
