Lost Twice: How 1920s Western Armenian Literature Predicted the Diaspora’s Extinction

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In the late 1920s, a young writer named Zare Vorpuni, living in émigré Paris, decided to publish his first book. The Armenian community had no printing houses of its own. To cover the costs, young authors followed an unwritten ritual: they would send copies to wealthy community leaders, hoping for a monetary “gift” in return. Vorpuni recalled this with bitterness—the handout was humiliating, impossible to accept without shame. There were no institutions to support literature, and no mass readership either. Once, as Vorpuni told it, he and Shahan Shahnour were walking through the Luxembourg Gardens toward Montparnasse. Shahnour suggested they gather all their books, burn them, and hang a sign in the garden: “Here lies literature that had no people.”

This remark can be read as a bitter aphorism about the fate of post-genocide literature. But it also contains a diagnosis whose relevance is not limited to the 1930s or to the Armenian diaspora in France. Among the two million Armenians (by unofficial estimates, up to three million) living in Russia today, there is not a single serious author writing in Armenian about the Armenian diaspora experience there. Armenian-language books, when they appear at all, are written in Armenia, largely for readers in Armenia. The literary process—the production, circulation, criticism, translation, and intellectual life of the Armenian language—is absent. Shahnour’s sign deserves to be placed not only in the Luxembourg Gardens.

The Body of Language

In 1991, the year Armenia declared independence, Lebanese-American writer Vehanoush Tekian noted a shift that had been unfolding over several decades within diaspora organizations: “In the first decades of diaspora, language was our longing. Then it turned into our shield, and ultimately into our self-consciousness. But now, all of that is obscured, and instead, a strange solution is put forth: spirit. Without the pulsing body of language and culture, what is spirit if not a mere specter?” Tekian was speaking about Western Armenian, but the question she raised carries broader meaning.

Scholar of Armenian diaspora literature Talar Chahinian draws a distinction between two concepts that are often conflated: the literacy apparatus and the literary apparatus. The first refers to the system of language instruction: schools, textbooks, teachers. The second encompasses the entire complex of literary production: books, journals, criticism, translations, literary tradition. Chahinian insists that language cannot be sustained by literacy alone. A language survives when people think in it, argue in it, describe the present through it, and process experience with it. Vazgen Shushanian had already formulated this law differently in the 1930s: “This generation has cut its umbilical cord to the past. There is no critical mass, no next generation. The Armenian language is dying—becoming bookish or fragmenting into dialects.” Without literary production, a living language either hardens into officialese or breaks apart into dialect clusters with no connection between them.

The opposition between “spirit” and “the body of language” is not a rhetorical device. When diaspora organizations invest in symbolic Armenianness—emblems, flags, dances, and appeals to a great past—while offering no literary process in return, they ultimately choose a path that leads to the language losing its function as a tool for analysis and discussion. Armenian ceases to be a language of the present.

The Paris Lesson

The Armenian diaspora in Paris of the 1920s and 1930s shows how literature can emerge despite almost everything working against it. Writers existed without publishers, a stable press, or a substantial readership. Critic and novelist Hagop Oshagan framed the problem this way: “Despite an abundance of talent, the diaspora does not have literature.” He then listed five conditions necessary for its existence: an organized society, an intellectual atmosphere, disciplines, psychological types and crises, ideologies and generations. “Do you see any of these things in the psychology that characterizes a dispersed, sectarian, and self-contesting diaspora?”

In November 1925, the editorial board of Haratch described the state of Armenian thought in the diaspora in words that read like a diagnosis: “Like our people, our thinking is nomadic as well. There’s no central point or hearth that attracts and unites all our forces in order to put them to the use of the general good. Yerevan has turned in on itself, it produces and it sings.” Yerevan was living its own life, while the diaspora remained suspended in the space between a recent catastrophic past and a nameless, elusive return to the homeland—Western Armenia. It is precisely in this in-between space that Krikor Beledian locates the function of literature: where history has been severed, literature takes on the task of stitching broken time back together.

The journal Menk, founded in 1931 by a group of young writers—Shahnour, Nartuni, Sarafian, Shushanian, Vorpuni, and others—was an attempt to answer that challenge. The Menk manifesto proclaimed a cultural identity rooted not in the tribal divisions of a lost homeland, but in the realities of the present: exile, survival, the absence of a state. It was a demand to describe what exists, not what once was. Nigoghos Sarafian pointed at the time to the central obstacle: to create, a writer needs either a milieu or a tradition, and they had neither. And yet, texts emerged.

Why? Because the rupture was absolute. In 1915, this diaspora was severed from its homeland with no possibility of return. Language became the only territorial dimension of their existence, the only place where they could live. The journal Hay Kir wrote in the 1920s: “Our new generation is experiencing a terrible famine of national consciousness. It is neither a lie nor an exaggeration to say that whatever color we give this famine, it is more tragic than the massacre of the blade. It is the masterpiece of the dreadful crime that our history already once witnessed.”

The Absence of Rupture

Now it is necessary to address what is absent from the Russian situation. The Armenian diaspora in Russia took shape mainly after 1991—not under the pressure of genocide, but as a result of economic migration (and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh) from independent Armenia and the post-Soviet space. The homeland continued to exist. It remains accessible. One can fly there. Moreover, after the end of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenia held the status of victor and triumphant power, there was no existential fear of losing oneself. Furthermore, for the majority of Armenians in Russia, Eastern Armenian is the same language spoken in Armenia. We do not observe the fractured linguistic space that the Paris generation experienced.

This is precisely what makes the situation more alarming, not less. The trauma of 1915 set a literary process in motion by confronting survivors with an existential question: how to exist, in the Armenian language, here and now, with no possibility of return. The events of 1991 and 2020, the collapse of the USSR and the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, could, theoretically, have produced a comparable impulse. Instead, they generated literature within Armenia itself and Russian-language texts in Russia. The Armenian diaspora in Russia has not described its experience in Armenian. Armenian did not become the language for making sense of that experience, because there was no urgent need for it to exist in any material form. The symbolic was enough.

No Environment, No Tradition

In Lebanon, where the Western Armenian diaspora, established after the genocide, entered a new phase of cultural and intellectual development following the Second World War, institutions such as Haigazian College (later a university), Hamazkayin’s Nshan Palanjian College, and an Armenian studies department at Saint Joseph University emerged. There were schools, Armenian-language university education, publishers, and a readership. Educational institutions produced new editors to run newspapers and media outlets, and teachers who raised a new generation of readers and created the conditions for new writers to emerge. This is what accounted for the revival of Western Armenian literature in Beirut during the 1950s through the 1970s.

None of this exists in Russia. There are no full-day Armenian-language schools, with isolated exceptions. There are no Armenian-language media specifically addressed to Armenians living permanently in Russia, particularly those born and raised there. There are no publishers systematically producing books in Armenian for a Russian audience. There is no literary criticism. There are no journals. There is no shared platform where the question “who are we?” could be asked, and answered not from Yerevan, but from within the diaspora itself. Everything that exists, exists in Russian. This is a description of a fact with consequences.

The Union of Armenians of Russia, for example, represents only part of the community. Most Armenians in Russia are not connected to one another through stable horizontal structures. As Beledian reminds us, when Menk attempted to write a common manifesto, it proved impossible, because behind the question of the manifesto lay a deeper question: whether a “we” existed at all. He wrote: “The issue of commonality, of coming together, is basically a question of communication and exchange, of which literature is one of its many forms. Individuals with multiple and divergent reference points are incapable of speaking a common language. They are unrelated, unbound from one another.” The Russian diaspora is physically scattered —from Moscow to Krasnodar, from Rostov to Yekaterinburg. It has no common language of communication in Beledian’s sense: no channels of interaction capable of producing not virtual, but living cultural events.

There are, unfortunately, no Armenian-language texts written by Armenians in Russia about the lives of Armenians in Russia. There is no account of this particular experience: the experience of people who live in a major city, work in factories and offices, ride the metro, watch Russian television, and at the same time maintain an Armenian identity—of varying intensity, quality and fate. This experience exists, and two million people carry it within them. Yet it has not been given shape, named, or reflected upon, at least not in Armenian. In the Russian diaspora, Armenian is ceasing to be a language for analyzing the present. It remains the language of the past, the language of grandmothers, the language of holidays (kef).

Sarafian wrote of his own generation in the 1930s: “Whichever road our friends may take with the goal of creating an unbiased national art, they will fail, falling into anemic platitudes. One cannot build such a large edifice on air.” Today, this reads as a warning. Appeals to a great past, the cult of historical figures, and a pathological passion for commenting on already recognized geniuses, all of these are symptoms of decline, not signs of cultural vitality. Hagop Oshagan captured this paradox with regard to the Paris diaspora: “Why have all these irresponsible books in the past few years been devoted to the cult of our writers, when over that same period only a few real books have even been written? The answer to this question is easy. But few people will even think of linking this phenomenon to the profound decadence that our thought has plunged into, after so many catastrophes.”

Symbolic Armenianness

Sociologist Anny Bakalian, in her study of the Armenian-American community, described a process she called the shift “from being Armenian to feeling Armenian.” Traditional Armenianness means language, religion, family ties, the daily practice of culture. Symbolic Armenianness, by contrast, is identification with the Armenian past and heritage without using the language as an everyday tool. This transition, as Bakalian shows, is virtually inevitable in the absence of a network of day schools. Armenianness becomes a marker of origin rather than a living practice.

In the Russian context, this shift is complicated by proximity to Armenia. It is precisely this proximity that creates the illusion that everything is fine: there is a country and its culture, and one can travel there at any moment. But Armenians in Russia are not citizens of Armenia. They cannot automatically become part of its institutional life. Yerevan is not the center of the Russian diaspora, it lives by its own logic. This illusion of closeness—a surrogate Soviet Armenia without full access to modern Armenia—is the central trap. It delays recognition that, if nothing changes, the next generations will follow a path already described in the books of the 1920s and 1930s: the gradual fading of the language, the shift toward symbolic Armenianness, the severing of kinship with Armenians in Armenia.

Surmelian, a first-generation Armenian-American writer, stated this choice plainly: “I lost the battle for the Armenian language in order to win for myself and for my people the battle for the Armenian spirit, which is more important. We can’t go against historic processes. Sooner or later we shall lose our language, but we need not lose our Armenian spirit.” Applied to Western Armenian, severed from its foundations by genocide, this logic was at least understandable. Applied to Eastern Armenian in Russia—where the language is alive, Armenia exists, and is accessible—it means something different. It means voluntary abandonment.

Conclusion

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Armenian diaspora debated whether dispersal was a temporary condition or a permanent one. The same question stands today, but the answer now carries different practical consequences. If the Armenian diaspora in Russia sees itself as temporary, a transitional state on the way to a possible return to Armenia, then there is no need to worry about institutions. But if it is permanent, and all demographic and historical evidence points precisely to this, then the absence of schools, media, publishers, and a literary process in the Armenian language means only one thing: assimilation.

“The dispersion is a second death, a moral and intellectual phthisis,” wrote the journal Nor Havadk in the 1920s. It was a diagnosis that demanded treatment, and treatment required collective effort: a shared circle, a shared platform, a shared language, not in the metaphorical sense, but in the literal one. The Paris generation lacked resources, but not will. The Russian diaspora today lacks will, though its resources are incomparably greater.

The Armenian diaspora in Russia has no voice because there is no environment in which that voice can be produced, heard and preserved. As long as Armenia remains the sole source of Armenian identity for the Russian diaspora, the diaspora will not become an agent. It will remain an object—of someone else’s history, someone else’s narrative, someone else’s language.

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