Download PDF | Bernard Outtier - Armenia between Byzantium and the Orient_ Celebrating the Memory of Karen Yuzbashian (1927–2009)-BRILL (2019).
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Introduction
As a token of their gratitude and recognition of the significant work of Karen Yuzbashyan (1927-2009), his friends, disciples, and former colleagues dedicate the present collection of twenty-five contributions to the memory of this great Armenian scholar. The volume focuses on research pertinent to the history of the Armenians and the manifold contexts in which they produced and articulated their culture, the main topic of Karen’s own scholarly interests.
The opening section of the volume, “Memoria,” offers three personal accounts, presenting memories of Karen that have their origins and sources within his family (written by the older one of his daughters, Elena) or are offering perspectives of a life-long friendship (authored by a recognized senior scholar in Armenian studies, Nina Garsoian) and through the eyes of a disciple who visited him in St. Petersburg already during Soviet times (written by professor James Russell).
The main section of the volume contains twenty-two scholarly articles subdivided into three parts.
The common interest in Armenian sources as a depository of Jewish and early Christian materials, unites the seven articles of Part 1. These materials comprise biblical, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphical texts (Shirinian and Horn), works by Philo or Pseudo-Philo (Bukovec), documents of early Christian liturgies (Gippert and Winkler) and homiletical sources, the latter addressing theological (Raphava) and paraliturgical (Lourié) materials.
Part 2 contains eight contributions on Armenian history as well as textual and material culture directly. They deal with the literary history of Armenia from the early Christian and late antique period (Aleksidze and Chitunashvili; and Mahé), and from later epochs (Terian, Cowe and Andrews), with the history of material culture and art (Asryan and Donabedian), or work with material that is relevant across a broader chronological range (Drost-Abgarjan).
The seven contributions included in Part 3 examine wider cultural contexts that are relevant for Armenian Studies: represented here are studies discussing intercultural communications between Armenian and Iranian (Lurje and Russell), Roman and Byzantine (Treadgold), Byzantine and Georgian (Outtier), Georgian (Gaprindashvili and Ostrovsky), as well as Coptic (Youssef) contexts.
In its final section the present volume offers two essays that collect, in a compact and easily accessible format, important data pertaining to Armenian ecclesiastical and secular history (respectively by Dédéyan and Mutafian).
The complete bibliography of Karen’s scholarly works (132 entries) was published by Aleksan Hakobian in Handes Amsorya (Vienna—Yerevan): GQupkt Piqpwgtwuh (6.011927-5.03.2009) qhnnwywt wefuwmutputph Uwutuwghuniphit,’ Vwupwumtg Uy. 3wynpiwup, Swuntu Uduonkwy, phti-z, SPO wuiph (2009), 481-494. [ “Bibliography of the Scholarly Works of Karen Yuzbashyan (6.01.1927—5.03.2009),” compiled by Al. Hakobian, Handes Amsorya, iss. 1-12, year 123 (2009), cols. 481-494.]
The editors are grateful to all, whose assistance made this volume possible: to Karen’s family, especially his daughter Elena Yuzbashyan and her husband Shimon Iakerson, whose support for this volume from the very first steps was the necessary foundation; to Alexey Shchekin for his technical assistance; to Viktor Kharyk and Polygramma Type Foundry (www.polygramma.com) for providing a Unicode font for the Georgian Nuskhuri and Asomtavruli scripts; to Robert R. Phenix and Matthew DeLong for very substantial contributions of their time and efforts in the process of editing articles presented here in English; to Ken Parry and his fellow board members for accepting this book for the series Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity; and to the anonymous reviewer of this volume for her or his attention to each and every detail. For any remaining errors, of course, the editors alone carry the responsibility.
The authors of the individual contributions and the editors of the present volume trust that their efforts and findings would have pleased Karen Yuzbashyan, who possessed and communicated such an acute sense of the relevance of striving to see and understand the intrinsic unity of the Christian civilization and the Byzantine commonwealth, considering the Armenian culture as a precious jewel that is set within a beautiful whole. It was our goal to preserve and convey this perspective also in our composition of this volume.
July 8, 2018 The Editors
CHAPTER 1
A Free Man in a Free Country
Elena Yuzbashyan
My father who was a very handsome man came into the world go years ago in a very beautiful place with a remarkable name, Vtoroy tupik Engelsa (Second Friedrich Engels dead end), in an old borough of Tiflis. I believe that this lovely name has since disappeared, along with the Soviet toponymy in its entirety, but it was always remembered with gusto around the house. Karen Yuzbashyan was born on January 6, Christmas Eve in Russia, and Christmas for the Armenian Church. He died on March 5, one of the most important days for the shredded history of the country, when all the good-hearted and honest citizens of the former Soviet Union, even teetotallers, gladly take a shot of vodka since it was on that day that Stalin died half a century earlier.
When I was a child, I thought that the word ‘work’ implied something incredibly attractive: sometimes I would go into the Caucasian Studies Room where Dad’s table stood by the balcony with a view of the Peter and Paul Fortress, one of the main views in town. I was certainly unable to see all of this beauty from our home—we lived away from downtown, where Khrushchyovkas! were built, but the history of our street was really miraculous: originally called Bolshaya Ob’yezdnaya (Big Bypass) it was named Orbeli Brothers Street right after we moved there. Joseph Orbeli,? one of the three brothers, was the PhD advisor to my father. It was he who invited my father to come to Leningrad for a postgraduate course, and in 1964, my father published his biography.?
Just like all the people in his orbit, my father was, in the first place, a member of the intelligentsia in the Russian meaning of the word, and an Armenian only in the second place, or, using modern language, his “Russian intelli-gentsia’s” identity was primordial. We are not always conscious of such things. For instance, when abroad, we always say that we come from Saint Petersburg, not from Russia, without even realizing the role of this self-identity. In his correspondence with Efim Etkind, Igor M. Diakonov* noted (in addition to the well-known definition from his memoirs, whereby intelligentsia are those who can see an object from diverse perspectives) that, for members of the intelligentsia, what happens to the others or to society is more important than their own worries.
For Yuzbashyan, ethnically an Armenian, or Kakabadze,° a Georgian, or Lyubarsky® or Lundin,’ Jewish, their personal daily worry and pain was, first and foremost, everything happening to society, Russian culture and literature. Overall, pondering on the destiny and role of the Russian intelligentsia loomed large in the thoughts and conversations of my father’s friends and colleagues from his institute—all those striking people and scholars— Menshikov,® Zograf,? Fikhman.!° In my childhood, I heard from them something that I read about in Diakonov’s works years later: Europe has some members of the intelligentsia but no social phenomenon such as intelligentsia, i.e. no class of people who are close-knit, critically-minded, who help each other without asking for reward—those who can “see an object from diverse perspectives.” My father once said that at some point his friends and colleagues agreed to offer help, unconditionally and free of charge, to their mentees and young colleagues in every way possible, and that was always the case within my recollection: the mentees first, and only after them the children and grandchildren.
As Diakonov put it, “and that is why we are drawing the string to rescue the last remains of this unique phenomenon, the Russian intelligentsia, which is the salt of the earth.” All of them were immune to self-admiration, and every one of them was endowed with refined self-irony in abundance.
As for the ethnicity, which turned into such a burning issue when perestroika began, I will forever remember what my father said back in the time of Soviet stagnation, when his closest friend Saurmag Kakabadze was telling him about the 1956 anti-Khrushchev rebellion in Tbilisi, which he, regretfully, witnessed: “The worst part of a national idea is that those obsessed with it are prepared to embrace any colours.” And all this is not at all at variance with the fact that during the years of perestroika he passionately embraced Armenian life, became a deputy to the Armenian Parliament, and even temporarily renounced science for politics but, in truth, soon got bored with such politics. His foreignness to political life is reflected in a remarkable episode from our family folklore.
Once during a parliamentary meeting my father tried to cut short a plainly anti-Semitic intervention of a colleague who was speaking Russian, and lamented caustically that the colleague could not speak Armenian so that it was positively impossible to comprehend him. At which point another deputy bounced out at once and yelled—now in Armenian: “His Russian is much more akin to us than your refined Armenian (pwt Ain nw phupnnyqwiuth (sic!) hwytptup!)”
The sting of his “refined” Armenian was felt by my children when they— each one in due time—went to the kindergarten in Yerevan and kindergarten nurses did not understand them (e.g. they did not ask for permission to go to the toilet in the way commonly used in Yerevan but used a euphemism). My father cared about the language as if it was a living being so that calling him a purist means saying nothing. Sometimes we would use a Western Armenian word for the sake of purity to avoid cluttering up with redundant Russicisms (e.g., we would say qiutwfutdnn rather than Yuipmn ph, for “potatoes”). In this context, there was a very typical anecdote related by Dad’s cousin, Tata.
Tata was as usual complaining about her mother-in-law, my father was listening with half an ear but suddenly he shrieked: “Uytuntphu (to mother-inlaw)?!” Tata was staggered: could it be true that Karen for the first time took interest in some family squabbles? But next she heard him cry out in indignation: “UYtunnouw!” All was clear now: his furious reaction was only provoked by the use of a colloquial dative form rather than the literary one.
This meticulous purism applied not only to the Armenian but to Russian and even to other European languages just as well. Contrary to the atmosphere typical for Soviet times, lots of foreign guests always came to our place, and my father kept thinking about and looking into the words, colloquialisms, and slang. There was a shelf with an American slang dictionary, a huge case of French police novels (Série Noire) gifted to my father by our friend, the French consul, exactly because of his adoration of living language. One day my father informed me with deep satisfaction: “I wrote out three words, asked him, and the consul doesn't know two of them either!” (he meant some police argot). In this case, it was some kind of substitute for the living Paris, a city he dreamed about. A bottle of cognac was kept at home, to be opened in Paris, and luckily, my father lived to see the iron curtain fall and appease this hunger of his.
As it happens, it was exactly in the year of my father’s goth anniversary that I saw Oxford for the first time, and visited Yerevan after many years of absence. Those two trips proved to be a natural component of “Dad’s Year.” When in dazzlingly splendid Oxford, I kept imagining how my father viewed all this back in 1966 when he went abroad for the first time in his life to attend the Byzantine Congress. I remember contemplating as a child my Dad’s black and white photo of Oxford showing just a streetway with a line of unthinkable automobiles parked there. And in Yerevan, which was part of my father’s soul, and which, to some extent, stayed behind in the twentieth century, through all the heartbreakingly new features of the city, I suddenly received greetings directly from my father—I mean the city’s toponymy, the heritage of Levon Ter-Petrosian, the first President of Armenia. It is not only Lenin Avenue that was named after Mesrop Mashtots: I saw Movses Khorenatsi Street, a street named after Lazar Parbetsi, Dad’s last hero, and in some sidestreet I had a glimpse of Pavstos Buzand’s name.
My father, as it often happens, was proud of strange, somewhat “non-principal” things. For instance, he took pride in everything he made with his hands at our summer cottage, in his engineering expertise and skills (he was very proud to have completed three years of training at the Moscow Higher Technical School (nowadays Bauman State Technical University), the best technical high school in Moscow, before entering the History Department of the Leningrad State University). In fact, those technical skills ensured his smooth integration into the new computer age when many elderly humanities scholars felt helpless. He was gifted a computer, a Macintosh laptop, in America in 1990, and was sure that the Mac revived his scientific life. As regards his core activities, my father was extremely precise and I dare say tranquil in his assessment of himself and his role in science.
There was never a trace of drama in it—no jealousy, no attempt to reflect on the heights he reached. He said, for instance, in some context, that Nina Garsoian was by far the greater scholar; he spoke of the unreachable grandeur of Igor Diakonov. Both in the past, in my father’s lifetime, and afterwards I often learned and have been learning about his own role and that of his papers for the scientific life of other people. This is what I was told about by the Israeli historian Dan Shapira, the American scholar James Russell, and others. Recently Sergey Arkadievich Ivanov said that he came to Saint Petersburg from Moscow in the footsteps of my father’s old article of the 1980s devoted to the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople. Nobody studied this subject then, and Sergey was finding out what materials my father had used and how he had discovered this “goldmine.”
During the last couple of years, life around me and daily news have run afoul of my unbreakable optimism (in no small part inherited from my father) while the word “depression” has become too frequent for all of us. Yet I am better off than the others are: sometimes I can clearly hear my father’s cheerful voice in our kitchen in, say, 1974: “After all, we are free people in a free country!” It was always like this, it was extremely important, and this is what he taught, implicitly and subtly (for it would have been impossible otherwise) to the next generation—students and family members alike. It was with this sprouting freedom that Levon Hachikian, director of the Matenadaran, argued in his day vainly persuading my father to join the Communist Party: “Want to be the only goody-goody, don’t you?”
So now I start the day by looking at my father’s sunny photo in the French newspaper to which he gave an interview as a member of the Armenian Parliament in April of 1993, and where he was called européen convaincu. I take comfort in reading the large-font title, a quotation from the interview: “Nous n’avons pas droit au désespoir.”
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