The Johannissyan Institute is preparing a critical edition of French-Armenian writer Zareh Vorbuni’s (Eoksuzian) novels. In the 1960s Vorbuni brought to completion a series he had started working on in 1929 with his first novel The Experiment. Titled The Persecuted the series is comprised of six novels –The Candidate, Asphalt, An Ordinary Day, Tigran, For Yours is the Ability. Around the same time he published And Thus Became the Man which shared the conception of the series but didn’t form part of it. Vorbuni was one of the first diasporan writers who contemplated the Diaspora both as a tragedy of the irretrievable loss of the homeland and the possibility of intellectual subjectivisation. It is by no accident that both the title of the series and the author’s nickname (which means “orphaned”) register precisely this paradoxical experience of twentieth-century Armenian identity.
This publication makes it possible to present, for the first time, Vorbuni’s complete literary legacy previously exposed only in bits and fragments. This includes the critical republication of his published works as well as the fifth volume of the unpublished novel Tigran from the series The Persecuted along with several small sketches of unrealized novels. The preparation of the publication is accompanied with a public program of readings, workshops and a lecture dedicated to the founding texts of the genre “nouveau roman” in the Armenian context.
The publication of Vorbuni’s complete works is being realized through the collaboration between Siranush Dvoyan, literary theorist and researcher at the Institute and prominent diasporan literary theorists Grigor Beledian and Marc Nichanian.
The publication is financially supported by the Galouste Gulbenkian Foundation.