Ashot Johannissyan
Compiled and edited by Vardan Azatyan
Yerevan: Johannissyan Institute, 2016
ISBN 978-9939-1-0315-0
Israel Ori and the Armenian Liberation Idea is the first volume of Nerqin Grots Book Series. The volume presents the Armenian translation of historian and politician Ashot Johannissyan’s PhD dissertation which he defended in Munich in 1913, along with its German original. The book is complimented with Johannissyan’s working notes, as well as with extensive editorial notes which allow the reader to trace the development of the dissertation up until Johannissyan’s double volume monograph Episodes in the History of Armenian Liberation Thought. The book, in addition, contains the opinions of Johannissyan’s German professors regarding their student’s dissertation as well as Johannissyan’s speech delivered later in 1955 on the occasion of the defense of his doctoral dissertation in Yerevan. The book concludes with Vardan Azatyan’s study of Johannissyan’s life and work.
In his dissertation Johannissyan approaches Armenian history in a critical and dynamic manner. For him, history is a perpetually moving force that unfolds through internal (Armenian) as well as external (those of foreign powers) contradictions as the latter manifest themselves in late 17th and early 18th century Armenia. It is within these tensions that he traces the evolution of the liberation idea as a path to Armenians’ political modernization. Here, Israel Ori becomes the subject of these contradictory and complex processes who “at first unconsciously, announced a new temporality in the political consciousness of his compatriots, since after all he himself was forced to liberate his own political thinking from the dogmatic conceptions and historical memories of the Armenian middle ages that continued to live in him.”
The book was published with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The book is available in libraries and bookstores in Yerevan.