Davit of Sassoun: Armenian Folk Epic

349 Pages·2016·3.058 MB·English

by  Nairi Zarian

NAIRI ZARIAN
Davit of Sassoun
ARMENIAN FOLK EPIC

ARTWORK BY
KHOREN HAKOBYAN
We are grateful to Anna Hakobyan, Babgen Rostomyan,
Armen and Richard Kocharyans and all other supporters, who
greatly contributed to the publication of this book.
Grigor Khanjyan
Opening address

I have the pleasure of sharing a couple of words about Khoren
Hakobyan, his painting, art and especially this series of canvasses,
entitled Davit of Sassoun. I got to know Khoren Hakobyan closely
when working with him for the magazines Pioner (Pioneer) and
Tsitsernak (Swallow). Then I saw a painter who had a tender heart,
was full of humor, and possessed a flexible drawing style. I really
believe that he managed, through his expressive and meaningful
works, to instill a sense of beauty in the hearts of the younger
generation who read and enjoyed Tsitsernak and Pioner. As the
years went by, Khoren Hakobyan’s art became more powerful,
acquiring a solid nature, an experience of life and a philosophy. What
I saw in his studio came as a discovery to me, because I did not
know that side of Khoren Hakobyan's personality. And now, you too
may see this character. A true artist must by all means have
transitional phases in his life and never limit himself to saying, “I am
the connoisseur of this particular genre of art”. Yes, a true artist must
always be in quest of something. But that quest should not be formal
in its essence. I mean the kind of quest which conveys a meaning
and shapes a kind of art full of idea. We, the artists of the elder
generation, are often criticized for not understanding modern art and
not being able to give it a due appreciation. I don’t think those people
are right, as contemporary art too, has an idea, and a philosophy of
its own. And if it is based on that and conveys a message, that art is
really impossible to reject. But when an artist’s inability and failure to
try and work painstakingly lays the foundations of a new form of art,
it isn’t acceptable. That’s something that was proven in art over the
course of time. I am not the kind of person who becomes endlessly
devoted to a kind of activity once he or she develops a liking for it.
He can search and find. And that’s what I feel Khoren Hakobyan
really did. He dared to undertake Davit of Sassoun after a long
creative experience. And it was really surprising to me that he was
able to convert his small and tender graphic designs into illustrations
that stand out with their articulated Armenian style; breathing epic
spirit and monumental artistry, featuring heroes who will remain in
our minds forever.

The point is that the more artists, there are the more styles and
interpretations. That is where the secret of art hides; otherwise, one
artist would be enough for all people. Once again, I witness Davit of
Sassoun being illustrated, after a celebration marking the epic’s one
thousandth anniversary. I believe that Khoren Hakobyan’s Davit of
Sassoun has an interpretation and an approach of its own. He saw
the heroes in a way which was in harmony with his spirit. I find that
this is of paramount importance, because if one artist uses the
features of another, whether they be more powerful or weaker, that is
already a shortcoming. At all costs, an artist must strive to go beyond
predetermined frameworks, and Khoren did; this artist's concepts
and images are all his own.
That is a great success.

Grigor Khanjyan
People’s Artist of Armenia
1994 (excerpt from opening address delivered at the exhibition
“Davit of Sassoun”)
Davit of Sassoun
Illustrated by Khoren Hakopyan

Dickran Kouymjian

Scholars of epic literature have emphasized from the beginning of
comparative studies devoted to them that the dynamic improvisation
and poetic evolution of this, the most developed of oral literary forms,
stops when the story or saga recited or sung by the bard or minstrel
is written down. Surely this was a major factor in sealing the
development of what is now called Davit of Sassoun and regarded
today as the Armenian national epic. The publication of the first
transcribed variant of Sasna tsrer (literally the crooked or bent ones
of Sassoun, that is different than straight or normal, thus iconoclasts,
non-conformists, independent beings), as the various versions of the
saga were called when Fr. Garegin Srvandztiants recorded what he
heard from an illiterate reciter in 1873 and published the first ever
version of it in Constantinople the following year. The epic continued
to be recited decades after in the countryside of Western Armenia
around Sassoun and Moush, about fifty kilometers southwest of Van,
and neighboring areas, as we know by the collection of other, often
very different, versions in the following decades. The ultimate end of
the living oral tradition was provoked by the Armenian Genocide
committed by successive Turkish governments, which removed
through murder and exile the entire native population of Western
Armenia. Only those who had learned to recite one or another of the
various versions and who survived the physical destruction of the
Armenians were able to repeat the epic, in part or in whole, years
later when aggressive campaigns in the Armenian Republic were
initiated to uncover and transcribe verbatim all versions still
remembered among western Armenians who had taken refuge in the
new homeland.

The oral epic recited by the ashough or bard was not just a great feat
of memory, but one of creative inspiration with the usually illiterate,
often itinerant, poet adding details or modifying story lines as the
situation called for or his memory skills required. It was during the
first phase of this post-Genocide fieldwork of preserving the variants
among those who still remembered them, that members of the
corresponding branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in
Armenian decided to edit a digestible and coherent epic out the
greatly divergent versions already published or recorded; it was
necessary to synthesize the 65 known variants into a single and
singular work. In 1938 a team of philologists was assigned to this
task — Manouk Abeghyan, Gevorg Abov, and Aram Ghanalanyan —
all of whom had first hand experience transcribing variants among
peasant-class, mostly illiterate storytellers; the overall editor was
Academician Hovsep Orbeli. They had a deadline to finish this work
of synthesis by September 1939, which the Soviet Armenian
authorities decided to celebrate, somewhat arbitrarily, as the
thousandth anniversary of the creation of the epic of Sassoun. In the
process of accomplishing this task, the once regional story of the
heroes of the Sassoun-Taron-Moush region was transformed into a
national one and given the title Davit of Sassoun, The Armenian Folk
Epic.
Davit of Sassoun is caught between the fate of epic poems that have
stopped evolving because they are no longer recited by bards from
memory, that is the oral tradition gave way to a written or literary
epic, and the most unusual phenomenon that the raw material, now
some 130 variants of the Sasna tsrer reflecting nuances and
interpretations only partially incorporated into the official text are
most published in their original dialectical form. Among the many
striking features of the Sassoun epic compared to the great poems
of this genre—the Homeric epics, the Scandanavian Sagas,
Shahnameh, the Georgian epic, Niebelungen Lied, Song of Roland,
Song of Prince Igor—two are quite remarkable. Within the very rich
Armenian literary tradition spanning nearly 1500 years from the
creation of the alphabet until the Davit variants were collected and
published, a tradition very rich in historical and poetic writing, not
once is the epic of Sassoun or any of its protagonists mentioned. Its
various cycles were passed down orally for at least a millennium by
illiterate bards; they were ignored or simply unknown to the educated
class of clergymen and notables. Because of this total historical
silence, when the first variants were gathered and published some
thought the work was a creation of the recent pre-modern period.
However, research has revealed its clear mention by a twelfth-
century Arab writer as well as two sixteenth-century sources, the
Kurdish epic the Sharaf Nameh and a Portuguese travel account. Its
second unusual feature is the simultaneous creation and publication
of the commissioned synthetic version and the scores of diverse
variants used to create it. Homer’s consolidation of the numerous
narratives at his disposal to compose the Iliad and the Odyssey is
similar to what the troika of scholars did in 1939, but in the Greek
poet’s case, we have none of the variants he worked with only a few
fragmentary lines from earlier stories.

This nearly unique richness with regard to the genesis of the
Armenian legend also presents problems for serious scholars, the
most enigmatic of which is what should be considered as the
national epic, Davit of Sassoun or the variants designated as Sasna
tsrer? In our time almost all readers and the majority of scholars,
especially non-Armenian specialists, accept almost without question
Davit of Sassoun as the epic, many ignorant of its somewhat artificial
construction of 75 years ago. Sassountsi Davit is made up of four
cycles representing the same number of generations of its heroes:
Sanasar and Baghdasar, Lion Mher the son of Sanasar, Davit son of
Mher, and Lesser or Pokr Mehr son of Davit. Yet of the 47 published
variants collected in the time of the modern editors, only one
contained all four cycles. Manouk Abeghyan, himself, in the
introduction to the publication of the first volume of 25 variants
(1936) spoke of only three cycles, excluding that of Lion Mher.
Some variants have cycles that take the epic one or two generations
beyond Lesser Mher. The corpus of variants has a richness and
variety that provides a vitality that is reduced in the carefully
arranged authorized version.
In view of this one may ask legitimately whether the illustrations of
Khoren Hakobyan might not serve to regain some of the unexpected
excitement once shared by the audiences that heard the ashough
recite one or another of the variants of the epic of Sassoun. Though
the artist used as his narrative source the official 1939 version, his
drawings and paintings, over a hundred in all executed over the past
quarter century, some forty of which are used to illustrated this book,
are in a sense visual improvisations of the text interpreted by a
creator from another medium. Such mediation of a text potentially
allows the artist to interpret a meaning for the action of the narrative
being illustrated. In many respects this process is also available to a
translator and even to the committee of three who fashion the tale as
we have it in four cycles, making the different dialects of the variants
meld into a single approximate manner of speech peculiar to the
Sassoun-Moush region even though the final product sacrifices
some of the subtlety and irony found in the variants. If the editors
consciously intended to create something that could serve as a
national epic for all Armenians out of what was a regional story, the
final product tends toward a Manichean approach with between good
and evil: thus portraying the various characters as clear friends or
enemies of Armenians and the families and communities of the
heroes. Questions of infidelity among some of the four generations
of male heroes are often glossed over, as are the relations between
Muslim mistresses and the children of these illicit or at least extra-
marital relations. To what extent these gradations of meaning can be
reflected in the illustrations is itself a question. The qualities of the
most of the heroes, honesty, uprightness, independence of thinking,
unusual determination, and strength are very well captured by
Hakopyan as are the unworthy traits of Sassoun’s enemies.