An Unorthodox Priest and the Rediscovery of David of Sassoun

Typical of an epic tale, the Sasuntsi Davit epic cycle has a complex storyline. Regardless of variations across different folk variants, the epic story revolves around the House of Sassoun – four generations of Christian Armenian rulers that ruled the realm around the fortified mountain town of Sassoun, which they heroically defended from waves of Arab incursions until eventually defeating the Arab invaders in a duel between David of Sassoun and his vanquished Arab nemesis Msra-Melik (Orbeli Reference Orbeli1956, 24n1).Footnote ¹ Unlike many modern European national epics, Sasuntsi Davit was neither created by the native cultural elite on the eve of national awakening nor collected from preexisting written sources. Although the popularization of the Armenian epic resulted from the socio-historical circumstances of a not-so-distant historical period, the epic’s discovery in the late nineteenth century seems more like an accident than a contingency. The hefty folkloric components and nebulous historical origins of Sasuntsi Davit further suggest that its later monumentalization was far from preordained.

Even though little is known about the precise socio-historical context of the creation of Sasuntsi Davit even to this day, the accidental discovery of the story of David of Sassoun in the 1870s is arguably as monumental as the epic itself. Dickran Kouymjian reckons that “no literary Armenian source” since the beginning of Armenian literary traditions in the fifth century until the epic’s discovery “knows of David or any of the epic’s principal characters.” Furthermore, Kouymjian has the following to say about the the Armenian learned society’s millennium-long oblivion regarding Sasuntsi Davit:

Others equate the discovery of the Sasuntsi Davit epic cycle to that of The Epic of Gilgamesh and Digenis Akritas, as all three epics were supposedly “discovered” in the same period – the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Shalian Reference Shalian1964, xviii). Nevertheless, unlike the latter two epics, which were transcribed from written sources, Sasuntsi Davit had yet to be considered an epic, much less the Armenian national epic, when the story was first published in simple prosaic text in 1874. Furthermore, the 1874 publication that marks the discovery of the epic of Sasuntsi Davit is a crude variant of one of the four branches constituting what the epic is known today. The significance of the 1874 publication of what seems to be a simple folk story is that it unearths a vital treasure trove of the rich Armenian oral literary traditions that spread across three empires at the time and spanned multiple generations. Accidental as this discovery seemed, the publication of the story of David of Sassoun heralded a century-long series of efforts to recover, popularize, and celebrate a hitherto little-known dimension of the rich traditions of Armenian literature, whose multitudinous works have, over the past two millennia, left indelible imprints on the history of the Near East and beyond.

To underscore the socio-historical milieu of the epic’s discovery, a few words need to be said about the remarkable life and career of Srvandzdiants, the compiler of the first publication of the story of David of Sassoun. A native of the Van-Vaspurakan region in Eastern AnatoliaFootnote ² and a self-taught ethnographer and archaeologist, Srvandzdiants, in the early years of his priesthood, started dedicating himself to the writing of the geography and folk traditions, particularly religious practices, of his native region as well as the adjacent Taron and Sassoun regions, where he would eventually discover the epic story of David of Sassoun (Kostandyan Reference Kostandyan1979, 57).

Srvandzdiants’s discovery of the epic tale occurred at a critical juncture in the history of the Armenian nation. Shortly before the emergence of the Armenian Question in the early 1880s in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, a vital Armenian national enlightenment movement, known as the Armenian national awakening (zartonk), paved the way for the consolidation of the modern Armenian national identity. As Razmik Panossian has noted, the budding stages of Armenian national enlightenment, which took place in the decades leading up to the 1878 Berlin Congress, assumed a “multilocal” character as centers of Armenian culture and learning were spread across a vast geographical spectrum from Singapore to Venice (Panossian Reference Panossian2006, 128-30). Even though the traditional loci of Armenian learning and publishing continued to play an essential role in the trans-regional exchange of Armenian ideas and creativity, as Aram Arkun has pointed out, the most significant contributions to the rapid “cultural, intellectual, and administrative evolution of the Armenians” in this period came from the three Eurasian land empires – the Ottoman, Russian, and Persian Empire – that were home to the historical Armenian settlements thanks in no small measure to the cultural and political reforms that were unfolding in these empires (Herzig, Kurkchiyan Reference Herzig and Kurkchiyan2005, 73-4). Furthermore, as Houri Berberian has observed, communications among Armenians across these three contiguous empires intensified in the latter half of the nineteenth century thanks to technological advances and the growing national consciousness that was becoming increasingly politically oriented (Berberian Reference Berberian2019, 4-11). On the cultural sphere, not without vital political implications, efforts to modernize and standardize the Armenian written language were part and parcel of the Armenian national enlightenment. Subsequently, riding the tides of secularization, Armenian writers and intellectuals, many with ecclesiastical backgrounds, made important contributions to the establishment of the modern Armenian literary culture based on the vernacular language spoken in imperial metropolises as opposed to the archaic liturgical language that still dominated the printing press (Panossian, 132-47).

Under the influence of romantic nationalism, which had swept across Europe in the former half of the nineteenth century, Srvandzdiants, not unlike many nineteenth-century European ethnographers, took a keen interest in oral literature, pagan folk traditions, and mythology at a time when most Armenian philologists were still focused on medieval chronicles, most notably the ones by Movses Khorenatsi. In the introduction to his 1874 book, Srvandzdiants confessed that he had spent three years collecting Armenian folk stories when he encountered an Armenian peasant by the name of Grbo, who hailed from the Taron region, met Srvandzdiants near the Eastern Anatolian town of Mush in July 1873, and revealed to him the story of David of Sassoun (Srvandzdiants Reference Srvandzdiants1874, 127). Srvandzdiants’s act in transcribing this orally transmitted story using a colloquial, “dialectal” language that many of his contemporaries considered coarse and provincial, in the opinions of Aram Ghanalanyan, demonstrated the richness of the language used by illiterate Armenian peasants, and “addressed the important issue of replenishing the literary language with folk words and expressions” (Ghanalanyan Reference Ghanalanyan1985, 81-2).

Not without good reason did Srvandzdiants cast doubt on the reception of the first publication of the story of David of Sassoun. The provincial setting, vernacular language, pagan elements, and folkloric theme all set the story apart from the sophisticated and philosophically profound European-style novels, novellas, and plays that were being prolifically produced at the time by Russian- and German-educated Armenian writers in the neighboring Russian Empire. In the opinion of Kouymjian, precisely because of its isolation in a remote rural environment, the epic had remained unknown to the Armenian intelligentsia for centuries (Kouymjian 19). Srvandzdiants himself did not even label the story as an epic. As the passage from the book quoted at the beginning of this paper suggests, Srvandzdiants identified his work not as a landmark but as a bedrock that was to pave the groundwork for future endeavors in the studies of Armenian folklore. Not long after, the story of David of Sassoun spread to the Russian Empire and was picked up by Russian Armenian scholars who published their own variants, albeit for a limited public. These publications provided a vital impetus for Russian Armenian scholars to embark on the enterprise of collecting and studying the epic.

Sasuntsi Davit in the Pre-Soviet Period

The 1880s marked not only the first Russian-language publication of the story of David of Sassoun but also the takeoff of the remarkably prolific scholarly career of a young linguist whose life and career would span across the tsarist and Soviet periods. Manuk Abeghyan, widely considered the founding father of Armenian folklore studies, is indisputably the most important scholarly figure in the studies and promotion of the Armenian epic.

A native of the Russian Caucasus, Abeghyan’s early life had much in common with the other prominent Armenian scholars of his time. It was during his years at the Etchmiadzin Seminary that Abeghyan first learned about the Sasuntsi Davit epic in 1886 from the retelling by a traveling Armenian peasant from the Moks region of the neighboring Ottoman Empire not far from Sassoun (Manukyan Reference Manukyan1939, 62).Footnote ³

Abeghyan’s 1880 publication had significant implications for the Armenian epic. While the story of David of Sassoun compiled by Srvandzdiants one and a half decades earlier might have been considered simply an isolated folk tale, Abeghyan’s compilation and publication of the new, Moks-originated variant in verses implied that the story might have been part of an extensive, widespread folk epic cycle. Unlike the previous publications on the subject, which had remained largely unnoticed by the Russian Armenian scholarly community, the publications by Abeghyan drew considerable attention. In an article from this period, Abeghyan tried to place the struggles depicted in the epic in the historical context, likening David to the embodiment of the aspirations of the Armenian people (Abeghyan Reference Abeghyan1890, 39). Besides, some of his writings also gave hints of a materialist worldview, as Abeghyan attributed many cosmological and mythological motifs of the epic to the backwardness of the society in the period when the epic originated (Abeghyan Reference Abeghyan1889, 1849-50). While this line of thinking converged to a certain extent with many of Abeghyan’s later writings on the epic from the Soviet period, such Marxist notions as class struggles were not touched upon in Abeghyan’s early writings.

Notwithstanding the significance of Abeghyan’s efforts in studying the Armenian epic in 1889-1892, it remains doubtful how much interest in folklore his work ignited amongst Russian Armenian scholars. In 1889, the already influential linguist Nicholas Marr admitted in a review of Abeghyan’s first book that no serious studies on the Armenian folk epic could be done for the time being, as “the collection of Armenian oral tales had not ridden itself of its amateur and accidental character” (Marr Reference Marr and Rosen1890, 415). While Abeghyan’s absence from the Russian Empire during his studies in Germany and France in 1893-1898 might have been part of the reason for the virtual moratorium of scholarly works on the epic, the repressive tsarist policy concerning the Armenian population of the Caucasus between the mid-1890s and mid-1900s also severely curtailed the activity of the Armenian press and the vibrance of Armenian cultural life in the Caucasus. As the tsarist repressions of the Armenians gradually eased around the mid-1900s, Abeghyan took his studies of the epic to a whole new level through a series of scholarly articles, mostly in the journal Azgagrakan Handes (Ethnographic Journal).Footnote ⁴ In an article published in 1908, Abeghyan first iterated the politically tinged notion that the epic needed further development and promotion as a significant historical achievement of the Armenian nation (Abeghyan Reference Abeghyan1908, 211-2). While several prominent Armenian cultural figures such as writer and poet Hovhannes Tumanyan heeded Abeghyan’s calls for the promotion of the Armenian epic in the ensuing years, Abeghyan’s historically oriented approach to the studies of the epic was not adopted by many of them, especially the ones enwrapped in romantic nationalist sentiments like Tumanyan himself.

The writer, poet, and educator Hovhannes Tumanyan – one of the most celebrated literary figures in Armenian history – played a similarly vital role in the popularization of Sasuntsi Davit in the pre-Soviet period as Abeghyan, even though Tumanyan approached the epic as a writer and poet and returned to the epic only sporadically during the last two decades of his creative career between 1902 and 1923. Tumanyan’s poetic adaptation of one of the epic’s four branches, characterized by its poetic refinement, pedagogical qualities, and faithfulness to the epic’s folkloric basis, is undoubtedly worthy of note.

Tumanyan’s adaptation of the story of David of Sassoun was first published in 1902 in the same journal where Abeghyan published the bulk of his studies on the epic in the pre-Soviet period (Grigoryan Reference Grigoryan1969, 129). By the time Tumanyan published the complete poem in a book in 1904, sixteen variants of the Sasuntsi Davit epic had been published. Most of them were collected by Abeghyan. However, Tumanyan was informed primarily by four variants. Tumanyan intended his poem to be a children’s story. He based his poem on the third branch of the epic – the story of David of Sassoun. In the opinion of Soviet Armenian scholar Magdalina Janpoladyan, in his creation of the poem, Tumanyan intentionally steered clear of subjects that “might be incomprehensible” to the bulk of his readership – children (Janpoladyan Reference Janpoladyan1969, 20). Soviet Armenian scholar Eduard Jrbashyan observed that Tumanyan first composed the poem at a period when he was fascinated with folk epics and was, from the onset, intent on creating an epic about the “great struggle and the great ideals” of the Armenians (Jrbashyan Reference Jrbashyan1969, 177). In doing so, Tumanyan carefully selected and appropriated the four aforementioned epic variants as his principal sources. Nevertheless, the methods Tumanyan employed in his appropriation of the sources, in Jrbashyan’s opinion, were somewhat unconventional. While Tumanyan developed and edited different passages drawn from the recorded variants, he barely added any elements not existent in the original folk variants. Moreover, Tumanyan’s edits heavily focused on the epic’s inner philosophical messages, even though the poem contains few distortions from the original folk sources (Jrbashyan Reference Jrbashyan1964, 328-9). Tumanyan so masterfully pieced the selected folk passages together that “not a single verse” in his poem “seems out of place or gives the feeling that [the poem] is a creation by the poet rather than the [common] folk.” Equally remarkably, the poem stands out for its “simplicity” and “accessibility,” thanks in no small part to its use of plain folk language (Janpoladyan, 22-39).

These outstanding characteristics, in the words of the Soviet Armenian writer Levon Hakhverdyan, imbue the poem with its “epic monumentality” thanks to the author’s faithfulness to the Armenian epic, as Tumanyan successfully “took from the folk epic not only the [main] hero and the [main] idea but also the style of epic narration [and] the style of actions,” which explains the “ideation” and “aesthetic” of Tumanyan’s poem (Hakhverdyan Reference Hakhverdyan and Malkhazova1969, 202-3). As an admirer of the epic genre, Tumanyan was intent on harnessing the rallying potential of the Armenian epic to boost the Armenian national psyche through his folk-inspired poetic prowess. In the words of the Soviet Armenian scholar Kamsar Grigoryan, Tumanyan’s poem, much like his worldview, replicates the balance between “the national and the universal in the epic.” This is thanks to Tumanyan’s conceptualization of the epic genre not through “the theory of the mythological school [of thought]” but as a “reflection” of the “universality of folk ideals” (Grigoryan Reference Grigoryan1969, 131-2). In his correspondence with the poet Avetik Isahakyan, Tumanyan reaffirmed his universalist approach to the Armenian epic, thereby arguing for the importance of not separating the national character from folk life and not conflating folk legends with history (Isahakyan Reference Isahakyan1956, 170). Moreover, in Grigoryan’s opinion, by minimizing the number of characters and actions in his poem, Tumanyan effectively highlighted the folk spirit subtly conveyed by the epic (Grigoryan Reference Grigoryan1969, 133-4).

Despite the poem’s widely acclaimed refinement, Tumanyan’s adaptation of Sasuntsi Davit was not copiously reproduced in the Soviet Union. Unlike Tumanyan’s other popular stories, tales, and narrative poems, there were no theatrical, animated, or cinematic productions based on his poem Sasuntsi Davit in Soviet Armenia. And, in the pre-Soviet period, the adaptation of the Armenian epic by even such a revered Armenian writer as Tumanyan was insufficient to acquaint significant segments of the Russian reading public with Sasuntsi Davit.

On the eve of the Russian Revolution, when Armenian literature remained relatively unknown to Russophone readers of the Russian Empire, the Russian poet Valeriy Bryusov, one of the spearheading figures of the Russian symbolist movement, took it upon himself to familiarize the Russian public with Armenian poetry, many works of which Bryusov himself had translated.

Like numerous fellow Avant Garde Russian poets who sought inspiration from other Eurasian literary traditions, Bryusov started manifesting an interest in Armenian literature in the 1910s and spent considerable stints studying and researching Armenian literature. An extensive anthology of Armenian poetry compiled and published by Bryusov in 1916 for the first time introduced Sasuntsi Davit to a wider Russophone audience. Among hundreds of Armenian poems from ancient folk mythology to poems by Tumanyan, the anthology also included excerpts from a variant of Sasuntsi Davit recorded by Abeghyan. Bryusov’s brief introductory remarks on Sasuntsi Davit are particularly noteworthy when viewed in comparison to the later Soviet official approach to the epic. In assessing its importance to the Armenian literary traditions, Bryusov affirmed that no Armenian folk poem had managed to consolidate into a unified epic comparable to The Iliad, The Odyssey, or The Nibelungenlied, a notion that the Soviet regime tried everything in its power to rebuke through the promotion of Sasuntsi Davit. Nonetheless, Bryusov went on to affirm that the figure of David of Sassoun could be interpreted as an embodiment of “people’s ideals” and an “immeasurably strong, dauntlessly brave, profoundly purpose-driven, unwaveringly honest,” and “[persistently] truthful” hero (Bryusov Reference Bryusov1916, 39-40). Without explicitly ascribing these character traits to the Armenian national character (if there exists one), Bryusov underscored the spiritual puissance in the figure of David of Sassoun that could be potentially exploited for nation-building. This is precisely what Soviet authorities attempted to do in the late 1930s with the help of a Soviet Armenian national intelligentsia fully loyal to the Kremlin. Nevertheless, it took the Soviet authorities and the Soviet Armenian intelligentsia well over two decades to fully realize the potency of Sasuntsi Davit in rallying Armenian nationalism for the Soviet cause, not without some notable earlier individual attempts in this enterprise.

In late November 1920, after two and a half years of existence, the First Republic of Armenia, which had achieved considerable progress in socio-economic development during its brief independence, collapsed at the advance of the Bolsheviks. Even though Armenia would continue to remain a de jure independent state until its formal annexation by Soviet Russia in 1922, the Bolshevik invasion not only effectively upended Armenian independence but also heralded a new era of revolutionary changes.Footnote ⁵ On the day after the Bolshevik takeover of Armenia, Stalin, in his capacity as Commissar of Nationalities of Soviet Russia, proclaimed the Bolshevik power over Armenia with the following pronouncement:

Even though Bolshevism had not been popular amongst the population of Russian Armenia before the Bolshevik invasion, many members of the Armenian intelligentsia quickly hopped on the bandwagon of the Sovietization of Armenia.

Immediately after the Bolshevik invasion of Armenia, two notable Eastern Armenian cultural figures produced their own literary and visual adaptations of the epic story of David of Sassoun in their reactions to the revolutionary changes. One was the German-educated painter Hakob Kojoyan, the author of the first visual representation of Sasuntsi Davit. Kojoyan’s painting, Sasuntsi Davit, depicted numerous episodes of the epic and incorporated characteristics of various contemporary European art forms. According to a later Soviet account, Kojoyan’s visual representation of Sasuntsi Davit was an expression of the “new ideas related to the heroic struggles for freedom of the Armenian people in the past” and was inspired by “the triumph of the Soviet order” in 1920 that had led to “the salvation of the Armenian people” (Martikyan Reference Martikyan1961, 12). Similarly, in 1922, still in emigration, the Armenian poet Isahakyan published his adaptation of the story of Younger Mher from the Sasuntsi Davit epic cycle in Vienna under the title of Sasma Mher (Mher of Sassoun). Even though Isahakyan had earlier discussed the epic of Sasuntsi Davit at great lengths with Tumanyan, the creation of Sasma Mher two decades after Tumanyan’s poetic adaptation, as Isahakyan admitted after his “repatriation” to Soviet Armenia in 1936, was directly inspired by “the victory of the October Socialist Revolution” (Manukyan Reference Manukyan1939, 158).Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, Kojoyan’s and Isahakyan’s adaptations of Sasuntsi Davit received noticeable official endorsement only after the 1939 Jubilee.Footnote ⁸

One of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Bolshevization of Armenia, the poet Yeghishe Charents produced his poetic adaptation of the epic in a narrowly circulated poetry collection published in 1934. Although this marked the first Soviet-era attempt at appropriating the Armenian epic, the poem was consigned to oblivion due to its problematic portrayal of class dynamics in the epic not long before Charents was arrested and subsequently perished during the Great Terror. Charents’ poem was not the only publication on Sasuntsi Davit in the 1930s that failed to converge with the official dictates on the epic.Footnote ⁹ Another such publication came from none other than Manuk Abeghyan.

Sasuntsi Davit and Its Class Question

According to Abeghyan, between the mid-1900s and the mid-1930s, all the studies on Sasuntsi Davit were conducted by himself (with the notable exception of the anthology by Bryusov discussed earlier, few allusions to Sasuntsi Davit appeared in the press in this period) (Manukyan Reference Manukyan1939, 83-4). Nonetheless, the publication that culminated in the watershed of the development of the Armenian epic is not free of controversies.

A few words need to be said about the publication and its legacy. 1936 marked the publication of the first-ever collection of folk variants of the Sasuntsi Davit epic cycle. Under Abeghyan’s editorship, the book was intended to be the first tome of a multi-volume series. Twenty-five folk variants were included in the book, most of which were collected by Abeghyan. While the bulk of the variants dated before 1913, a handful of variants were collected between 1933 and 1935. All the variants from the latter period were collected from Anatolian-born Armenians who had settled in the Soviet Union/Russian Empire in the preceding decades. For the publication, Abeghyan counted on the support of his junior colleague Karepet Melik-Ohanjanyan.Footnote ¹⁰ The two scholars jointly penned the thirty-five-page introduction to the collection of folk epic variants, offering their insights into the historical, literary, linguistic, and ethnographic aspects of the Armenian epic. Later accounts confirm that Abeghyan had been tasked by the authorities several years earlier with the compilation of folk variants of the epic (Harutyunyan, Darbinyan-Melikyan, and Yeghiazaryan Reference Harutyunyan, Darbinyan-Melikyan and Yeghiazaryan2004, 6). Some sources published in the Soviet Union after Charents’s rehabilitation even suggest that Charents himself recommended and supported Abeghyan for the task in 1933, the same year the controversial poem about David of Sassoun was published (Sahakyan Reference Sahakyan1975, 16-7). As is evident from the meager print run of this publication, there was not yet an official policy to promote Sasuntsi Davit as the national epic of the Armenian people.

It is questionable whether the Soviet authorities approached Sasuntsi Davit as an epic at all before 1938. While the Soviet government gave incentives to the collection and systemization of folk oral literature throughout the Soviet Union in the 1930s, different genres of folklore were being published in the Soviet Armenian press in that period. Apart from folk variants of the Sasuntsi Davit epic cycle, numerous titles of Armenian mythology were published in the 1930s. While the book appeared under the main title of Sasna tsrer – the alternative title of the Sasuntsi Davit epic cycle, which Abeghyan used consistently in his scholarly writings – the subtitle of the book was Folk Tale (Zhoghovrdakan vep).Footnote ¹¹ Most references to the epic in the introduction and the preface employed the same term, even though the term epic (epos) had already been incorporated into the Eastern Armenian language in official use in Soviet Armenia. In the opening pages of the introduction, Abeghyan and Melik-Ohanjanyan classified Sasna Tsrer as a novel in the genre of “epic-historical songs.” The chronology given by the co-editors in the introduction also differed from the dating that would later be used to mark the epic’s Millennium Jubilee, as the two scholars dated the creation of the poem to the thirteenth century – three centuries behind the later officialized version (Abeghyan Reference Abeghyan1936, IZ-26). As the publication’s title indicates, the heroic exploits of David of Sassoun, unlike in the poems by Tumanyan and Charents, were not singled out. Without either an author or a towering figure to showcase the moral essence of the Armenian national character, it was still premature for the Soviet authorities to elevate Sasuntsi Davit to the pedestal of the Armenian national epic the way Shota Rustaveli was to be celebrated in neighboring Georgia in the following year.Footnote ¹²

Nonetheless, a deeper problem with this publication lies in the editors’, chiefly Abeghyan’s, approach to the question of class relations in the epic – a susceptible subject in the Stalinist context. In the segment of the introduction dedicated to the subject of class backgrounds, the two scholars described the epic as “a primarily feudal novel” (Abeghyan Reference Abeghyan1936, IZ-26). The main argument for this line of reasoning was that the epic was created during the long feudal period of the history of the Armenian people. During this period, the ruling class monopolized the production of culture and thoughts, as the feudal configuration of the society created favorable conditions for the ruling class to seek entertainment by expressing their thoughts poetically. The fact that the epic’s main heroes are rulers seems to support the notion of the epic being a brainchild of the ruling class.

The premise of this approach to class relations is the chronology of the epic’s creation and evolution presumed by Abeghyan and Melik-Ohanjanyan, who believed that the epic had emerged by the thirteenth century when the feudal class was dominant in Armenia. Regarding the multitude of folk elements in the epic, the two scholars argued that even though the epic had been created in the period that lasted until the thirteenth century, it “migrated” from the feudal ruling class to the peasant masses in the succeeding centuries during which its form and content consolidated. The scholars believed that from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, as the feudal aristocracy disintegrated as a cohesive class and was eventually replaced by the bourgeois order, a new phase of “redaction” took place in the rural milieu amongst peasants, who had acquired the epic from the craftsmen and builders – the intermediate strata of the social hierarchy between the peasant class and the ruling class. Therefore, after centuries of consolidation through oral transmission, in the opinions of the two scholars, the epic assumed its folkloric form “characterized by a peasant worldview, peasant economic and social relations, [and] rural household lineages” that were inherent to the agrarian economic life of the Middle Ages. For this reason, even the rulers in the epic seem to think and behave like peasants (Abeghyan Reference Abeghyan1936, IZ-26-IZh-30). The two scholars argued that despite the folk retouch, the epic retained many feudal relations because descriptions of class-oriented privileges could be subtly traced in the epic.

To sum it up, the only scholarly/analytical work on Sasuntsi Davit published in the Soviet Union before 1938 promulgated the notion that Sasuntsi Davit was a work created by the ruling class that later descended into the folk masses. Notwithstanding their typical folk mannerisms, the epic’s main heroes must have hailed from aristocratic backgrounds. By this line of thinking, the main heroes of Sasuntsi Davit are, after all, proponents of the patriarchal order. This explains why Abeghyan and Melik-Ohanjanyan, like the Soviet press and academia at the time, did not discern any patriotic message in the epic. It was only after 1938 that the “feudal school” got turned on its head by the Soviet authorities.

Epic Weaponization: The Politicization of Sasuntsi Davit and the Buildup to the Jubilee

Even though Armenian poets, writers, and artists had started integrating Sasuntsi Davit into their own works by 1936, the epic had not yet come to symbolize Armenian patriotism, espouse a collective thirst for justice, or epitomize the Armenian national psyche. Until 1939, there was not even an official text of the epic. Moreover, the immortalization of the figure of David of Sassoun had not yet taken place in the public imagination, much less in the public sphere or public space. It was a momentous decision by the Party leadership of Soviet Armenia on September 7, 1938, that would soon result in the politicization of the epic’s content, the weaponization of ideas extracted from the epic, and the monumentalization of the figure of David of Sassoun. The geopolitical background is essential in the making of this decision and the events that followed suit.

On September 7, 1938, the chief party secretary of Soviet Armenia, Grigor Harutyunyan, issued a decree on behalf of the Central Committee of the Armenian branch of the Communist Party on the celebration of the millennium of the creation of Sasuntsi Davit. According to the decree, which appeared on the front page of all newspapers in Soviet Armenia in the following days, the Jubilee was to take place in May 1939. Less than half a decade since the 1934 Jubilee commemorating the millennium of the birth of Ferdowsi, the Soviet Union was to witness yet another grandiose countrywide literary jubilee in what seemed like a parade of national literary holidays that featured the centenary of the death of Pushkin in 1937, the 750th anniversary of the birth of the Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli in 1937, the 125th anniversary of the birth of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko in February 1939, among others.

Nevertheless, there were crucial differences between the Sasuntsi Davit Jubilee and all the other all-union literary jubilees in this period. The most obvious difference was the subject of commemoration. Instead of a literary figure, however enigmatic, the Armenian Jubilee was to commemorate the creation of a work of literature that did not have an identifiable author. The Georgian epic vepkhist’q’aosani, commonly attributed to Shota Rustaveli, was shrouded in considerable mystery. However, at least its creation could be dated to the well-documented reign of a monarch, as its author noted in the poem. By contrast, even two years earlier, the preeminent researcher of Sasuntsi Davit, Manuk Abeghyan, dated the creation of the Armenian epic centuries later than the timeline that was now to be officially reinforced. Unlike the other all-union literary jubilees of the late 1930s and 1940s, whose celebrations were typically planned two years in advance, the celebration of the Sasuntsi Davit Jubilee was announced only eight months ahead. Moreover, the announcement came at a time when there was not even an official text of the epic. Even the epic’s title to be featured in the Jubilee celebrations – Sasuntsi Davit – differed from the hitherto more commonly used one – Sasna tsrer. While a Russian text of the epic was still non-existent (due to the absence of an official Armenian text), the Russian-language title of the epic, an approximate transliteration from the Armenian, barely made sense to Russian speakers. In many writings on the epic published in the same year, Sasuntsi Davit was not even referred to as an epic.

The most perplexing oddity about the announcement of the Jubilee’s celebration was the subject of the celebration. In the galactic constellation of Armenian literature that had had one and a half millennia of literary traditions since the invention of the Armenian alphabet by Mesrop Mashtots in the early fifth century, the Armenian national literary icon to be celebrated in an all-union jubilee was not Movses Khorenatsi, Yeghishe, Byuzand, or Mkhitar Gosh, who created illustrious historical accounts in the early modern period, or Grigor Narekatsi, the medieval mystic monk who composed heartrendingly profound spiritual poems, or Nahapet Kuchak or Sayat Nova, the minstrels (ashugh) who wrote and performed melodically lyrical songs, or Khachatur Abovyan or Mikayel Nalbandyan, the Russian-educated national enlightenment writers who penned modern classics with progressive agendas, not to mention such modern literati as Raffi, Tumanyan, or Vahan Teryan. Instead, on par with Georgia’s Rustaveli and Ukraine’s Shevchenko, the flagbearer of the literary heritage of Soviet Armenia before the multinational Soviet population would be David of Sasssoun – a fictional character from a not yet systematized folk oral epic that had only been studied by a select number of living Soviet Armenian scholars.

In fact, the decree itself provides critical hints on the reasoning behind these polemical subjects. The concise yet pithy decree consists of only two sentences and is worth quoting in full:

This statement highlights two major themes that the Soviet authorities would harp upon during the preparations for the Jubilee: the legitimization of Soviet rule in Armenia and the defense of the Soviet Union against external enemies. These two themes were deeply intertwined, as the Armenian national identity was now to be subordinate to an overarching Soviet identity, and the officially dictated Armenian antagonism towards the outside world subsumed under the Soviet state’s geopolitical calculations. Both themes were to be cloaked under the officially crafted Soviet Armenian national character through the monumentalization of Sasuntsi Davit as the national epic of the Armenians and the sanctification of the figure of David of Sassoun as a personified embodiment of Armenian valor and patriotism.Footnote ¹³ In the following months, numerous publications and public events sought to justify and rationalize the decision to stage the Jubilee by highlighting one or both major themes of the celebration and promote the public knowledge of the Armenian epic, all in the absence of an officially approved collated text.

Epic Bellicosity: Sasuntsi Davit and the Fascist Threat

Immediately after the official announcement of the Jubilee’s celebration, the Soviet authorities started justifying the decision with an array of newspaper articles and high-level meetings. The first such meeting was held in Yerevan twenty days after the decision’s announcement (Grakan tert, Oct 2, 1938b). Several newspaper articles set the tone and paved the ideological groundwork for the meeting and the events afterward.

One article published in the principal literary weekly of Soviet Armenia the week after the announcement sought to provide a comprehensive note on the epic’s ideological value and relevance to the current geopolitical situation. The anonymous article started with an affirmation that the decree to celebrate the epic’s Jubilee – not the epic itself – was “a document of the utmost political and cultural significance.” Then the article went on to suggest that “only in our country have there been endless opportunities created for the folk masses to quench their thirst for science [and] to master the achievements of science [and] the creations of art and literature accumulated throughout the millennia of human history,” the “best” of which is the “folk heroic epic” Sasuntsi Davit. In addition, the article unprecedentedly provided a timeline of the creation of Sasuntsi Davit, claiming that its historical basis dated to the seventh century, and that it “was formed and completed as a heroic epic” in the tenth century, which corresponded to the official framing of the celebration as the Millennium Jubilee. In summarizing the epic’s main ideas, the article’s anonymous author provided a succinct list of the guiding principles in promoting the epic. According to the article, Sasuntsi Davit articulated the aspirations of the poor peasant masses and documented their struggles against foreign invaders; the artistic and literary uniqueness of the epic lay in its profound folk components, juxtaposed with the virtual absence of ecclesiasticism. In other words, not only was the epic secular (and therefore progressive), but it also disdained the ruling class, which, in this case, was not the House of Sassoun but the clergy. As the article suggested, the embodiment of folk characters and ideals in the figure of David of Sassoun, made the epic “a humanistic poem in the deepest sense” and “a poem about free, hardworking, wonderful people.” More importantly, the article argued that by showcasing the “immortality” of the folk masses through the resistance of the Armenian people against foreign invasions, Sasuntsi Davit demonstrated how “European diversionists and Dashnak-fascist bandits” would fail in their conspiracy to “destroy the freedom-loving children of the Armenian nation,” even if “the enemies of the people, under the Trotskyist, Dashnak, [and] fascist banners, work[ed] in every way possible to tarnish and distort the historical past of the Armenian people [by] presenting them as a pusillanimous and dark mass.” In conclusion, the article reaffirmed the relevance of the poem to the Soviet reality, arguing that “Sasuntsi Davit, through its patriotic spirit, also reached the people of the Stalinist era,” because “the best ideals of Sasuntsi Davit,” the ones that showcased the “struggle of new heroes for the peaceful and happy life of the people,” were now to be enshrined in the Soviet literature thanks to the official efforts to promote the epic (Grakan tert, Sep 14, 1938).

Another important subject addressed in the Soviet Armenian press immediately after the announcement of the Jubilee’s celebration was the class dynamics in the creation of the epic and in the epic itself. Overlooking the 1936 folk variant collection edited by Abeghyan, an op-ed published on the eve of the first high-level meeting on the epic sought to unpack the epic’s class origins and the class-oriented contentions in the epic. The article asserted that “a serious analysis of folklore shows that [folk] heroes belong to the people,” because folk heroes would fight for the people regardless of the class backgrounds ascribed to them in folk creations. In Sasuntsi Davit specifically, the figure of David was the embodiment of people’s ideals, aspirations, love for peace, and “the glowing traits” of people’s “character.” Therefore, David fundamentally differed from his arch-nemesis Msra-Melik despite both being rulers of their respective domains. Contrary to David, who embodied his people’s collective will and national character, always protected his people, and worked for the benefit of his people, Msra-Melik was a despot who “did not embody the power of the people.” Far from being predisposed to “protect his people,” Msra-Melik was an “archetypal feudal lord” who, “like a monster, would always seek to destroy, embezzle, [and] impoverish” regarding his neighboring states and “suck the blood” of their population. Moreover, the article’s author affirmed that David’s benign character traits served as proof that the epic was a creation by ordinary folks because such was the national character of the Armenians. Nevertheless, one of David’s “most fundamental” character traits, the author believed, was his “mercilessness” and “courage” in the face of his enemies, as he “always struck his enemies without pity because he was convinced of his strength and the righteousness of the work he had done” for his people (Grigoryan Reference Grigoryan1938a, 2).

Through the figure of David and his epic battle, the epic helped Soviet ideologues illustrate geopolitical antagonism from the lens of class conflict. However, the story of David was only part of the epic. With the Jubilee only months away, there was not even an official text of the epic to serve as a reference. Little bona fide research had been done or published. Furthermore, the public in Soviet Armenia and beyond had limited knowledge of the epic’s content and history. All these issues were to be raised at the official meetings that ensued under newly routinized anti-fascist and anti-Dashnak tirades.

Epic Dilemma: The Re\Writing of Sasuntsi Davit

After the dire ideological questions concerning the epic had been addressed in the official press, the government of Soviet Armenia held the first scholarly symposium on the Jubilee on September 27, 1938. As in all other all-union literary jubilees celebrated in the Soviet Union, an ad hoc Jubilee Committee was formed. Committee members, academics and party officials alike, apart from reemphasizing the main themes in the promotion of the epic, also addressed the more expedient issues about the Jubilee, particularly the editing of the epic’s collated text, research on the epic, celebratory events, and the epic’s translation into other languages spoken in the Soviet Union.

To have the epic translated into Russian and other languages, the leadership of Soviet Armenia first needed a standardized Armenian text, which was still non-existent. Within the Jubilee Committee, under the dominance of government and party leaders of Soviet Armenia, a so-called “brigade” was created to compile the official collated text of the epic. A special resolution was adopted at the meeting by the newly established Jubilee Committee to finish the final text of the epic by April 1939 to coincide with the Jubilee’s celebration originally scheduled for the following month. The Jubilee celebration eventually took place in September 1939. A delay in the compilation and translation of the text into Russian is a possible reason for the Jubilee’s rescheduling.Footnote ¹⁴ According to the resolution, the collated text of the epic was to be “simple and accessible to the masses.” A member of the Committee was ordered to travel to Moscow to put together a “brigade” of poet-translators for the release of the Russian translation of the epic (Khorhrdayin Hayastan, Sep 30, 1938). In addition, the Committee suggested that the Armenian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences hold a special symposium (one in which political discussions were secondary to academic ones) to discuss the compilation of the text and research on the epic. Another resolution was passed to organize an exhibition depicting the historical period at the time of the creation of Sasuntsi Davit. The exhibition, focusing on the Armenian people’s historical resistance against foreign invaders, was to be held during the Jubilee under the aegis of members of the Jubilee Committee (Grakan tert, Oct 2, 1938).

In an article written shortly after he arrived in Moscow, the Jubilee Committee emissary, Hrachya Grigoryan, highlighted the Jubilee’s ideological significance by extolling the virtues of the epic. According to Grigoryan, Sasuntsi Davit was not only the cornerstone of “Armenian folk creativity,” but also a repository of “the best ideas of the progressive humankind” and consequently “a universal achievement” belonging “not only to the Armenian nation but also to all the nations of the entire Soviet Union” (Hrachya Grigoryan Reference Grigoryan1938, 2). Less than a month after the Committee’s first meeting was held in Yerevan, the first Jubilee Assembly was held in Moscow under the auspices of the Soviet Writers’ Union. A special, all-union-level Jubilee Committee was set up at the meeting, which confirmed that the Sasuntsi Davit Jubilee was to be a significant countrywide mass festival on par with the 1937 Pushkin Jubilee. Members of the Committee also drafted a joint letter of appeal to the leaderships of all Soviet member republics for the popularization of Sasuntsi Davit on the occasion of its Jubilee (Grakan tert, Nov 7, 1938).

On December 10-11, 1938, at the second session of Armenia’s republican-level Jubilee Committee, a draft of the collated text was read by Abeghyan and his fellow Committee members to an audience of renowned scholars and party apparatchiks. This coalition of linguists, ethnographers, and bureaucrats approved the draft text and urged the epic-writing “brigade” to expedite their editing. The collated text of the Armenian national epic was thus decided at a party meeting. This meeting was also important due to the presence of Hovsep Orbeli, the renowned Armenian polymath who was then serving as the director of the Hermitage in Leningrad, one of the largest art museums in the world. Not long after, he would play a quintessential role in completing the final text. The Jubilee Committee also reached a consensus on the Russian title of the epic: instead of an approximate transliteration of Sasuntsi Davit, the epic was now to be titled David Sasunskiy in Russian, which made the Russian name of David of Sassoun resonant with the Russian epithets of such distinguished military commanders in history as Alexander of Macedon (Aleksandr Makedonskiy), Aleksandr Nevskiy, and Ivan Paskevich-Erevanskiy (Grakan tert, Dec 21, 1938).Footnote ¹⁵

As Sasuntsi Davit had started to draw the attention of the most high-profile cultural figures of the Soviet Union, Soviet Armenian scholars also started engaging in the studies of the epic professionally. Some of the early studies conducted by Soviet Armenian scholars were published in 1939. As in most articles about Sasuntsi Davit published in both the Soviet Armenian and the central press, ardent love for the Soviet homeland was often reiterated in tandem with burning hate towards the fascists. It is worth noting that vitriolic critiques of the Dashnaks that appeared frequently in articles about the epic published in 1938 faded in 1939. They were gradually replaced by equally bitter critiques of the tsarist regime. Nevertheless, the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, muted all anti-fascist rhetoric and undermined the militant narrative that the Soviet regime had previously invoked in the early stages of the preparations for the Jubilee. The pro-regime components in the official narrative nonetheless remained and permeated throughout the Jubilee and its aftermath. With the first body of scholarly literature on the epic completed, efforts were also underway to compile the collated text and translate the epic into other languages.

The full official text of the epic, in both Armenian and Russian, was published only weeks before the Jubilee celebrations kicked off (HHG 1939, 4). Orbeli, the most senior of all scholars who participated in the compilation of the text, often acted as spokesman for the scholarly cohort of the Jubilee Committee. With Orbeli’s presence in the academic segment of the Jubilee Committee, Abeghyan, who had practically monopolized all previous research on the epic, was no longer the most senior scholarly member and was formally subordinate to Orbeli, who had been appointed the Committee’s chairman. Not only did Orbeli assume the role of the primary spokesperson for the epic, but he also infused his ideas in the scholarly discourse on the epic. In the speech he gave on the collated text, Orbeli launched into a metaphorically embellished tirade denouncing “the rise of the feudal conception of the origin of the great Armenian folk epic,” the very theory that Abeghyan himself had promulgated three years earlier (Orbeli Reference Orbeli1938, 3). Orbeli himself provided details on the main tasks and purposes of compiling the collated text. At the time the Jubilee Committee decided to compile the text in September 1938, more than fifty folk variants, with a total of over 2,500 pages of text, had been collected. Every single variant was used as raw material for the compilation of the collated text (Orbeli Reference Orbeli1939a, viii). The main task of the editing committee, said Orbeli, was to “consolidate [different] variants into a coherent tale without twisting or distorting the text” (Orbeli Reference Orbeli1939, 95). In the meantime, claimed Orbeli, the Committee was tasked not only with “establishing the full text” but also with the reduction of passages to avoid redundancy, all without introducing “a single line that was not in the raw materials, viz the genuine transcripts” of the collected folk variants, or making even the minutest additions. The final text consisted of 10,000 to 11,000 verses. In Orbeli’s words, the greatest significance in the compilation of the collated text was to “provide an opportunity for a broader spectrum of readers to coherently get to know this magnificent epic in all its greatness.”

According to Orbeli, the compilation of the collated text based on preexisting folk variants fulfilled two main objectives. A critical issue on the agenda was the standardization of its literary language. As Orbeli wrote, by eliminating the dialectical peculiarities inherent in the folk variants, the editorial committee upheld “the language norms.” It implemented “the grammatical rules” intrinsic to the modern literary Armenian language. More specifically, the collated text was based on the standard Eastern Armenian language that was official in Soviet Armenia, even though all folk variants had been recorded from native speakers of Western Armenian dialects. Orbeli admitted that although certain “specificities of these vernacular dialects,” “grammatical peculiarities,” and “the sentence structure of the original” had been preserved, the overarching principle of the editing of the text was to ensure its “closeness” to the dialect that “laid the foundation of the modern, living Armenian language” and to readapt the phonetics of the text “to the Ararat [Valley] pronunciation.” Another vital objective of the collated text was to present the official version of the epic’s content. While there was much conflation concerning the characters and their actions in the different folk variants, the editing committee reorganized the main heroes and their feats in the collated text. Orbeli claimed that the collated text included the most characteristic deeds of each of the epic’s heroes to highlight their character traits, which purportedly paved the way for future studies of the epic and its main characters (Orbeli Reference Orbeli1939b, iv-ix).

This endeavor inevitably led to questions regarding the criteria for selecting episodes from folk variants to incorporate into the collated text. While some sources produced in the Armenian diaspora communities outside the Soviet Union or in the post-Soviet period imply that the collated text “does not reflect all the features” of the epic due to “certain ideological constraints,” the guiding principles in selecting the episodes remain largely unknown (Hambardzumyan Reference Hambardzumyan2016, 106). On the one hand, numerous examples serve to enhance the image of the epic’s protagonists, particularly the ruling members of the House of Sassoun. On the other hand, some episodes included in the collated text by no means paint a flattering image of the main protagonists. The extrapolation of specific stories doubtlessly enhances the drama and irony of the epic story. Meanwhile, some controversial episodes were possibly intentionally omitted from the collated text (Terteryan, Mkryan, Poghosyan Reference Terteryan, Mkryan and Poghosyan1939, 74). Regardless of the presence of controversial passages, it is worth noting that profanities are mostly absent in the collated text, and so are anachronistic Turkisms. These incongruities notwithstanding, many appraisals of the text by experts outside the Soviet Union were generally positive. However, some Western translators of the epic were disgruntled with the text’s caliber and the profile of the members of the epic-writing team. Their critiques of the text concerned the omission of several “highly significant episodes,” the negligence regarding certain “subtle thematic overtones,” the intentional downplaying of “the religious motif,” and awkward transitions (Surmelian, 14).Footnote ¹⁶ Even within the Soviet Union in the 1970s, some Armenian scholars leveled similar criticisms on the collated text (Gaysaryan Reference Gaysaryan1973, 61).

Ironically, even though the collated Armenian text was compiled by a team of linguists, the translators who rendered the epic into Russian and other languages spoken in the Soviet Union, particularly titular languages of Soviet member republics, were poets. The rubrics they adopted in their translation were poetic rather than scholastic. Part of what many critics desire for the Armenian-language text, namely the poetic quality and literary refinement, may have been attained in the epic’s translations into Georgian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Azeri.

Epic Extravaganza: An All-People’s Holiday in Soviet Armenia

The celebration of the Jubilee not only mobilized top party officials, literati, and scholars but also involved many ordinary people from school children to collective farm workers. Such all-people’s character was not unique to literary jubilees, as mass events in the Stalinist period were mainly designed to ensure the involvement of large parts of Soviet society in a participatory totalitarian system. Reciprocity between the regime and the population, based as much on voluntarism as on coercion, was part and parcel of the political culture under Stalinism. Even though much attention from the state media was directed at the public appearance of party leaders, literati, and scholars at such mass events, ordinary citizens’ participation in these events was just as meaningful from the perspective of the Soviet authorities. Collective farm workers and factory workers, who constituted most of the rural and urban populations, were targeted by the regime for mass participation in the Jubilee events. These events, understandably, were not merely public gatherings but officially orchestrated occasions for the indoctrination of the ideas promoted by the Soviet regime through the celebration of the Armenian epic. The Jubilee was celebrated not only in the Soviet Armenian capital, Yerevan, but in cities and villages throughout the republic. The involvement of broad segments of the population in the Jubilee was achieved not only through the staging of mass spectacles and the refashioning of the urban landscape, but also through visual impacts staged before large numbers of ordinary citizens through exhibitions, art publications, and artifacts.

Building vs. Rebuilding: Remembrance and Amnesia in the Sasuntsi Davit Jubilee

Numerous scholarly articles on Sasuntsi Davit were written on the occasion of the Jubilee. Newspaper articles and public speeches exalted the establishment of Bolshevik rule in Armenia. Even though all the peasant storytellers who contributed to the collection of the epic’s folk variants, and even the epic itself for that matter, originated in Eastern Anatolia, little was said about the fate of the Armenian population of this region. One omission in these writings seems just as noteworthy as many of the subjects discussed therein.

The reason for the Soviet public figures’ silence about construction and restoration in the epic possibly had to do with geopolitics and the politics of memory. During WWI and its immediate aftermath, Eastern Anatolia was ravaged by a series of massacres and forcible deportations later known as the Armenian Genocide. Some of the Armenians who immigrated to the Caucasus from Turkey during the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath contributed to the collection of the folk variants of Sasuntsi Davit, since the epic, as its title suggests, originated in regions of Eastern Anatolia far beyond the Russian/Soviet borders. Even though there was some official tolerance for the remembrance of the former Armenian-inhabited territories on the other side of the Soviet borders in the 1920s, the Soviet authorities cracked down on Armenian “national illusions” about the recovery of these territories in the 1930s. As the friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the similarly newly founded Turkish Republic continued into the 1930s, as Thomas de Waal has observed, the period in which the Jubilee of Sasuntsi Davit took place was characterized by an “enforced silence” on the “recent memories of death and destruction,” while the Soviet Armenian patriotism “was reframed to accommodate the coming Socialist future” (de Waal Reference de Waal2015, 109-10). It was only after the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide became official Soviet policy in the mid-1960s that Soviet Armenian writers and scholars started producing works of significant length about the destruction of the Armenian existence in Eastern Anatolia. In the late 1930s, nonetheless, it would have been problematic to hit this sore spot in Soviet-Turkish relations, especially if one considers the fact that much of Armenia’s territorial loss was cemented by the Bolsheviks through the signing of the Treaty of Moscow and the Treaty of Kars.Footnote ¹⁷

Epic Inspiration: The Sasuntsi Davit Tank Battalion in WWII

Even though the Second World War never reached the territory of Soviet Armenia, the population of the small Soviet republic experienced the war in ways like many of their fellow Soviet citizens. Over 300,000 inhabitants of Soviet Armenia (more than 20% of the republic’s population, the overwhelming majority of which being ethnic Armenians) were mobilized during the war (Yenokyan Reference Yenokyan2020, 403-8). At least 200,000 ethnic Armenians from other parts of the Soviet Union also fought in the Soviet Red Army (Harutyunyan Reference Harutyunyan2020, 393-402). The population of Soviet Armenia declined by more than 10% as a result of war casualties (Suny Reference Suny and Hovhannisian1997, 347-87). Soviet Armenian servicemen not only were incorporated into regular Red Army units but also fought in more than half a dozen Armenian national battalions of various kinds. Soviet Armenian troops and partisans participated in WWII battles in the Caucasus and on other fronts (Nersisyan Reference Nersisyan1980, 341-59). Several Armenian commanders who distinguished themselves in the war would become some of the only handful of non-Slavic Soviet marshals.Footnote ¹⁸ Within Soviet Armenia, factories were geared towards wartime production. Virtually all members of the national cultural elite wrote articles, poems, letters, and novels to help the Soviet war efforts (Khudaverdyan Reference Khudaverdyan1985, 20-33).

With memories of the Jubilee of Sasuntsi Davit still fresh among inhabitants of Soviet Armenia, many war appeals to Soviet Armenians invoked the epic. Like Rustaveli for Georgia and Nizami for Azerbaijan, the epic figure of David of Sassoun and the folk creation that bore his name were often cited as symbols of national pride for Soviet Armenia in the official narrative on the defense of the Soviet homeland during WWII. An officially endorsed anti-fascist demonstration in 1942 stated in its appeal to the nations of the Soviet South Caucasus that the Nazi invaders were “intent on trampling on and consigning to flames the immortal works of Shota Rustaveli, Nizami Ganjavi, such jewels of folk creation as Sasuntsi Davit, Kör-oghlu, [and] all that is dear to us, that comprises the national spirit, honor, and pride of the nations of the South Caucasus” (Muradyan Reference Muradyan1975, 57). Besides references to the epic, the figure of David of Sassoun was also used figuratively to symbolize the Armenian nation through references to Soviet Armenians as descendants of David in the Soviet press (Muradyan, 201). The image of David of Sassoun was used not only in appeals to Soviet Armenians but also in pro-Soviet messages addressed to Armenians in the global diaspora (Pravda, Aug 17, 1941). By late 1941, nonetheless, there had been no concerted efforts by the Soviet authorities to woo the support of the large global Armenian diaspora. As Ronald Suny has noted, the Armenian Apostolic Church (the Holy See of Etchmiadzin) had only recently been “ruthlessly disciplined and made subordinate to the Soviet authorities.” As the war broke out on Soviet soil, “the Soviet state and the Armenian church made an uneasy peace,” as “some of the closed churches in Armenia were reopened, and exiled clergy returned from Siberia.” Around this time, “in its desperate struggle for survival, the Soviet government quickly made a number of concessions to the Armenian Church, which became the major link between Soviet Armenia and the diaspora” (Herzig, Kurkchiyan 118).

One of the most remarkable contributions of the Holy See of Etchmiadzin to Soviet war efforts was the creation of a tank battalion under the name of David of Sassoun. In January 1943, the head (later Catholicos) of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Gevorg VI (Chorekchyan), appealed to Stalin and the republican leadership of Soviet Armenia with a recommendation to establish a tank battalion that would bear the name of David of Sassoun (Gevorg VI Reference Gevorg1944, 13). With the blessings from the Communist leadership of Soviet Armenia, the Holy See of Etchmiadzin donated a significant amount of church relics and money raised from Armenians in the diaspora to the newly established fund for the tentative battalion. Within months since the fund’s establishment, the Holy See of Etchmiadzin had been able to raise a considerable amount of money, mostly in hard currencies, through churches in the United States, South America, the Mandate of Palestine, Iran, British Cyprus, the Mandate of Lebanon, and Egypt. By late February 1944, slightly more than a year after the fund’s establishment, the tank battalion David of Sassoun had been officially created and incorporated into the Red Army (Muradyan, 713-9). The words David of Sassoun were inscribed on the turret of each tank in both Armenian and Russian. In the summer of 1944, following brief engagements with Romania in the Danube Delta, the tank battalion was deployed to the Baltic front, where it participated in decisive battles in Belarus and Lithuania. Many Armenian servicemen of the battalion were decorated with high distinctions (Kolanjyan Reference Kolanjyan and Arzumanyan1984, 204).

In the postwar period, the official patronage and public enthusiasm over David of Sassoun noticeably waned. However, even in the absence of literary festivals or influential literary or cinematic adaptations of the epic, the period between the mid-1940s and the late 1980s saw several waves of scholarly efforts to further collect and publish the epic’s folk variants, efforts by the Soviet Armenian creative intelligentsia to create new poetic versions of the epic, and David of Sassoun’s appearance in children’s stories and on the silver screen.Footnote ¹⁹ None of these undertakings helped to ingrain the image of David of Sassoun as powerfully in the Soviet public as a statue of the epic hero unveiled in 1959.

Epic Monumentalization: The Statue of David of Sassoun

On December 3, 1959, in front of the railway terminal in Yerevan, a crowd gathered at the square for the unveiling of the statue of David of Sassoun by the Soviet Armenian painter and sculptor Yervand Kochar. After a hiatus of two decades, the cult of Sasuntsi Davit was resuscitated in Soviet Armenia, not through a regime-endorsed mass event, but thanks to a splendid work of art that captivated the Soviet Armenian public without falling foul of the Soviet authorities. According to a newspaper report, as the white canvas slowly descended from the statue, “before the eyes of thousands of people gathered in the square, David of Sassoun emerged, mounted on Kurkik Jalali, wielding his Lightning-Sword” (Grakan tert, Dec 4, 1959). In the words of the Soviet Armenian poet and writer Gevorg Emin, spectators at the unveiling ceremony spoke of the statue as if “of a living person – David of Sassoun”; a six-year-old boy remarked that David of Sassoun “exterminated” an incalculable number of “fascists” in the “war,” and that it was David who “killed Hitler,” before an elder collective farm worker added that “David protected peasants’ houses from Turkish janissaries in the mountains” (Emin Reference Emin1959, 3).Footnote ²⁰

The statue of David of Sassoun, erected in 1959, was far more than a simple recreation of its 1939 plaster prototype that briefly adorned the square during the 1939 Jubilee and the following years. The final form of the statue, in bronze as opposed to plaster, was the result of substantial modifications by the sculptor. Soviet publications described the statue as “its sculptor’s creative victory” (Izmaylova Reference Izmaylova and Avazyan1969, 132) and “Yerevan’s unofficial emblem” (Harutyunyan Reference Harutyunyan1972, 17).

Soviet Armenia had many iconic symbols. Many of them were celebrated in officially organized mass events in Soviet Armenia in the 1960s and 1970s, a period characterized by relative stability and steady improvement of standards of living across the Soviet Union. The Armenian alphabet, one of the fourteen existing alphabets in the modern world, was celebrated in 1962 as the 1600th anniversary of the birth of its inventor, Mesrop Mashtots. Six years later, Yerevan celebrated the extravagant 2750th anniversary of its founding. Around the same time, the Soviet Union approved the construction of a memorial complex to commemorate the Armenian Genocide, whose fiftieth anniversary had triggered an unprecedented mass protest just several years earlier. In 1972, Soviet Armenia celebrated the 50th anniversary of its establishment. All these grandiose events became enshrined in the installation of highly visible monuments in the center of Yerevan. In contrast, the even larger 1939 Sasuntsi Davit Jubilee received its own incarnation after a lapse of two decades. However, the monumental statue by Kochar, albeit not located in the center of Yerevan, became more than the visual memento of a politically motivated mass festival with a shaky historical basis and a sinister ideological undertone. Thanks to its formidable visual impact, the bronze statue of David of Sassoun has become emblematic of Armenia and is better known than the epic it was created to celebrate. It is telling how, in 2009, post-Soviet Armenia commemorated the 50th anniversary of the statue’s unveiling through the issuance of a postage stamp, even though 1989, when Armenia was still part of the Soviet Union, had gone by without a jubilee of the 1050th anniversary of the epic’s creation. The epic continued to be honored and remembered in Soviet Armenia and beyond in ways that were not only textual but also visual.