Lecture at NAI

Unpublished Isahakyan: Stories Preserved in Archives at the Naregatsi Art Institute

On October 20, the Naregatsi Art Institute hosted the lecture entitled “In the World of Isahakyan’s Manuscripts” by Shogher Khachatryan, PhD in Philology. During the meeting organized ahead of Avetik Isahakyan’s birthday, she presented unpublished materials preserved in the writer’s notebooks, diaries, and letters.

After the publication of Avetik Isahakyan's "Memoirs" by Aram Inchikyan in 1977, the diary material entered scholarly circulation. However, the vast majority of the notebook entries made in parallel are still unpublished.

Shogher Khachatryan, an employee of the M. Abeghyan Institute of Literature, who is the author of a dissertation on the topic “Avetik Isahakyan’s Diaries and Memoirs,” 9 scientific articles, and 1 monograph, presented the details of the archival work.

"I am currently studying the notebooks and letters kept in the Charents Museum of Literature and Art and the family archive. About 4 thousand pages have been analyzed, 3 thousand of which have been processed and are being prepared for an academic publication volume," said Shogher Khachatryan.

The speaker also touched upon the technical difficulties of deciphering manuscripts:
"The difficulty is that sometimes it's very difficult to date a manuscript, since the date isn't always included with the inscription. Sometimes, dating has to be done based on the state of the ink."
The notes and letters contain quite interesting material about famous cultural and public figures of the time, and their relationships with them, which may also be useful for those studying the biographies of other personalities and the situations of that historical period.

The notebook entries, which are an important source for studying the poet's life and creative work, will be presented to the public in their entirety for the first time in the 10th volume of the academic edition in two parts, which will be released in 2027.

During the evening, Shogher Khachatryan dedicated her monograph "The Diaries and Memoirs of Avetik Isahakyan" to the Naregatsi Art Institute.