Yeghishe Charents

Yeghishe Charents (real name  Soghomonyan Yegishe Abgar) is a poet, a classic of Armenian literature, a person whose life was full of personal drama.

Yeghishe Charents was born  on 13 (25) March 1897 in Kars, in the family of a petty trader. He studied at the Kars real school. In 1915 he volunteered to the army.

Loving son of his land, ancient and beautiful Nairi, his sensitive, quivering heart grieved all misfortune and tragedy of genocide in 1915. He was an avid poet of the struggle for liberation of the motherland. Romanticism and the renunciation of his first works are replaced by genuine revolutionary heroics of the time (“Violent mob” (1919), Immolate (1918-1920), “Everyone, everyone, everyone”(1921), “Lenin “(1924),” Uncle Lenin “(1924),” The Ballad of Vladimir Ilyich, the peasant and a pair of boots “(1924),”Lenin and Ali (1925), “The Wall of the Communards in Paris” (1926), “Cast-iron Man “(1928),” Epic Dawn (1930).

On the other hand, much of Charents’ poetry of 1920-1930-ies is not touched by the political topic of the day at all. Since 1930 the situation changed, revolutionary poems were opportunistic, Charents lost faith in the Soviet regime. Prominently in the works Charents engaged in translation of Pushkin, Mayakovski, Goethe, Verhaeren, Whitman, Gorky. The articles about H. Toumanyan, A. Isahakyan, V. Teryan, Maxim Gorky, on contemporary poetry belong to him.

Charents has done a lot for the Armenian Soviet literature, was one of the founders of Union of Proletarian Writers “Noyember” (1925). In 1937 Charents was repressed. In Yerevan you can find a street named after him, a monument, as well as a house-museum of the poet. On March 1, 1999, a banknote of 1000 AMD was put into circulation in Armenia with a portrait of Charents against the backdrop of Mount Ararat.