"La Rinascita Perduta"- The Lost Renaissance

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http://www.thealligatoronline.com/?article/97
Anoosh Chakelian, una brillante studentessa armena di Oxford University scrive sul blog della rivista online, THE ALLIGATOR...(ved.sito sottoindicato)
Titolo dell'articolo:

"La Rinascita Perduta"
"Come il genocidio privò l'Europa dei movimenti culturali più promettenti".(L'allusione agli intellettuali brillanti e promettenti molti dei quali uccisi a Istanbul nella "domenica rossa" del 24 aprile 1915...che spezzò un movimento intelletuale in piena crescita o "fioritura"..)

.......The memory of this lost renaissance hangs by a thread. Almost wholly forgotten by history, it preserves itself through the beauty and sadness of the few works left available to us. The genocide did not just end one and a half million lives, but also cut short a newly flourishing intellectual movement. The purges of Red Sunday were a tragic symbol of the ambivalent relationship between culture and the changing course of history.

The Lost Renaissance
How the Armenian Genocide robbed Europe of one of its most promising cultural movements
by Anoosh Chakelian, 2nd June 2009
The memory of this lost renaissance hangs by a thread. Almost wholly forgotten by history, it preserves itself through the beauty and sadness of the few works left available to us. The genocide did not just end one and a half million lives, but also cut short a newly flourishing intellectual movement. The purges of Red Sunday were a tragic symbol of the ambivalent relationship between culture and the changing course of history.


Anoosh wrote this article for this political blog that is set up at Christ Church college – Oxford University.
The Lost Renaissance
How the Armenian Genocide robbed Europe of one of its most promising cultural movements
by Anoosh Chakelian, 2nd June 2009
Should it happen we do not endure
this uneven fight and drained
of strength and agonized
we fall on death’s ground, not to rise
and the great crime ends
with the last Armenian eyes
closing without seeing a victorious day,
let us swear that when we find
God in his paradise offering comfort
to make amends for our pain,
let us swear that we will refuse
saying No, send us to hell again.
We choose hell. You made us know it well.
Keep your paradise for the Turk.
(“We Shall Say to God”, 1917)

Vahan Tekeyan wrote these bitter words in 1917, three years after the purges of Armenian intellectuals by the Ottomans on April 24th 1915. He was the only major poet to survive. This massacre of a generation of poets, writers and intellectuals became known as Red Sunday. This date is commemorative for the Armenians today; a symbol of the first stage of genocide, Ottoman cruelty and a lost renaissance.
In morbid anticipation of these “summons to misery”, Armenian literature developed an obsession with nationalist values
Armenia is a country on the Eastern border of Turkey and was a part of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and 20th century. The Young Turk revolution took place in 1908, which saw reform-minded Turkish nationalists overturning government of the Empire from the iron clutches of the Sultan. This revolutionary movement breathed life into the intelligentsia of Armenia, as it lifted censorship and allowed the Armenians to further their search for a national identity, the “Armenian Spirit”. Tekeyan and his contemporaries were given an outlet for their creativity. Yet this was no insular, nationalist project; Armenians heavily drew on the European intellectual tradition, merging it with Armenian culture to create a cosmopolitan and dynamic movement. Inspired by the cries of “Rome or death” of the Italian revolutionaries during their struggle for unification in the 1860s, one Armenian nationalist intellectual, Mikael Nalbandian, penned a patriotic poem. Its last verse is as follows:
Death is the same everywhere.
Man will only die once,
But blessed is he who
sacrifices his life for the liberty of his nation.
Little did Nalbandian know that this was to become the Armenian national anthem. As his literature was infused with European ideas, so Nalbandian shook certain areas of the continent. His anti-Tsarist sentiments meant that it was forbidden in Russia to possess a picture of him. But there is evidence of his poetry being secretly circulated by the Russian intelligentsia. Intellectuals like Nalbandian brazenly defied the frail Russian tsars, the tightening fist of Bismarck and the flawed romanticism of Garibaldi. The Armenian intelligentsia had taken to the European stage for a breathtaking, yet ultimately doomed, performance.

Preserver of Armenian folk music Gomidas
Before realism made cynics of them all, the idealist young thinkers were preoccupied with the beauty of romanticism. Misak Metzarents, often described as the “Keats of Armenian poetry” managed to leave a rich legacy of heavily romanticised poetry, dying at the young age of twenty two. History stole his life, but not his words, for he remains greatly popular. In the 1840s, he would often gather with other members of the Kedronakan school of thought in obscure cafes hidden in Constantinople’s dense centre. This elite of artists and philosophers would all wrote for the same publications, such as “Hayastan” (“Armenia”) which formed the hub of the Armenian intellectual subculture. These explored national liberation, alienation and hypocrisy of the upper classes. They were often satirical and humorous and gave rise to the success of political cartoonists.
He immortalised the musical culture of the Armenian countryside; these songs that are still sung today would have been forgotten after the annihilation of a race in 1915.
Metzarents wrote of delicate human emotions, love for mankind and the splendours of the natural world. His poems also reflected his fears of the increased Turko-Armenian tensions. In 1895-96, widespread massacres took 200,000 Armenian lives, a sinister “dress rehearsal for what was to come.” The melancholy and futility of this extract from Metzarents’ poem “My Shoes”, written in 1903, reflects his reaction to the tragedy unfolding around him.
On the streets of my city and the trials of my village
We walked tirelessly, with no complaints, needless to say.
With dust on your brow and parks in your eyes,
We obeyed each summons to misery together.
The shift to this bleak tone in Metzarents' work echoes the sinister direction of Turko-Armenian relations at the turn of the century. In morbid anticipation of these “summons to misery”, Armenian literature developed an obsession with nationalist values. The 1880s saw the death of romanticism and the rise of realism. At first, writers explored human values and universal themes in the context of Armenian nationalism. Yet as the cruelty of the Ottoman authorities manifested itself, the more revolutionary and active the intellectual movement became. Tired of philosophising, writers turned to revolutionary anthems to vent their political frustrations. An example of this is the 1890 manifesto of the Federation of Armenian Revolutionaries which contains a powerful verse of revolutionary poetry:
Eh, black days, turn into protest,
Blood and sweat become parturient,
Suffering and deprivation, speak,
Open the way for the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.
Yet this apparently militant political endeavour was coupled with an urge to preserve the Armenian culture. A fascinating character in this quest to rescue the arts was Gomidas, an Armenian musician. He was plagued by the visions of violence and terror that were to become a reality on April 24th 1915. He sensed the imminent dangers posed by the Ottoman forces and began to preserve the folk songs and dances of the peasants by travelling the country and writing down each song on manuscript paper. He immortalised the musical culture of the Armenian countryside; these songs that are still sung today would have been forgotten after the annihilation of a race in 1915. Although Gomidas was not a direct victim of the genocide, he was driven mad by the suffering and death that he saw and died in a psychiatric clinic in 1935.

The horrors of the Armenian genocide
A death symbolic of the annihilation of the renaissance is that of the elusive Siamanto. A prominent writer and poet who went by this pen-name met a premature end. His house was raided, he was taken, tortured and killed and buried in an unmarked grave on Red Sunday along with around two-hundred and fifty other intellectuals. Having studied in the United States, writing for an Armenian nationalist newspaper there called the “Homeland”, he had returned to this homeland in 1913. There, he visited famous Armenian landmarks for inspiration, like Mount Ararat and the central church at Echmiadzin. The return that had prompted his literary inspiration was the reason for his downfall. Some of Siamanto’s poetry could have been written as a response to the massacres in which he was killed, as in “Thirst”:
And all the stars of slaughtered lives, so like to
eyes grown dim, in the pools of my heart this
evening are dying of despair and of waiting.
The memory of this lost renaissance hangs by a thread. Almost wholly forgotten by history, it preserves itself through the beauty and sadness of the few works left available to us. The genocide did not just end one and a half million lives, but also cut short a newly flourishing intellectual movement. The purges of Red Sunday were a tragic symbol of the ambivalent relationship between culture and the changing course of history.

Diran Chakelian & Seta