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Մթնաձոր [Mtnazor]
Bakunts [Aksel (Axel) Bakunts (Alexander Tevosyan)] was born 1899 in Goris (Armenia) and educated at the Gevorkian Seminary in Echmiadzin. Always outspoken, his first publication, a satirical account of the mayor of Goris, earned him a stint in jail in 1915. He subsequently served as an Armenian volunteer in the battles of Erzurum, Kars and Sardarabad. Between 1918 and 1919 he was a teacher, proof-reader and reporter in Yerevan. In 1920 he was accepted to the Kharkov Institute in Ukraine to study agriculture. After graduation in 1923, he worked as an agronomist in Zangezur, a region of Armenia that features prominently in his short stories. From 1926 he settled in Yerevan where he quickly established his reputation as a gifted writer with his first collection of short stories entitled Mtnadzor [The Dark Valley]. His oeuvre includes short story collections, various individual pieces in the press, fragments of novels destroyed following his arrest in 1936, and three screenplays for films produced by Hyefilm in the 1930s. A colleague and friend of Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937), Bakunts was a member of the former's Armenian Association of Proletariat Writers. Bakunts fell victim to the Stalinist terror and was accused of various crimes including alienation from socialist society. He was arrested in 1936 and is believed to have been shot after a twenty-five minute trial in 1937. The house in Goris, Armenia, where he grew up was opened in 1957 as a museum dedicated to his life and work. (wikipedia.org)
- GenresShort Stories
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1927
1 person is currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
Aksel Bakunts
23 books11 followersAxel (Aksel) Bakunts (Armenian: Ակսել Բակունց, real name - Alexander Stepani Tevosyan, June 13 , 1889, Goris - July 8, 1937) was an Armenian prose writer, film-writer, translator and public activist.He was born in a family of peasants. In 1923 he finished the Agricultural university of Kharkov and became the senior agronomist of Zangezur region.
His most famous works are "Alpiakan manushak" (dedicated to the Arpenik Charents, the first wife of Yeghishe Charents), "Lar-Markar", "Namak rusats tagavorin" ("A letter to the Russian czar"), "Kyores" (1935) etc. Bakunts also was a film-writer ("Zangezur", etc.).
In 1937 he became a victim of Stalinism and was executed by firing squad after a 25-minute trial.
A house museum of Bakunts is opened in Goris, Armenia.
His most famous works are "Alpiakan manushak" (dedicated to the Arpenik Charents, the first wife of Yeghishe Charents), "Lar-Markar", "Namak rusats tagavorin" ("A letter to the Russian czar"), "Kyores" (1935) etc. Bakunts also was a film-writer ("Zangezur", etc.).
In 1937 he became a victim of Stalinism and was executed by firing squad after a 25-minute trial.
A house museum of Bakunts is opened in Goris, Armenia.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 19, 2020
Great talent rarely appears alone, silent on a hill or sitting solitary in an ancient monastery contemplating life and god and that which has come before. Gifts grow in a specially cultivated ecosystem prepared and set into which the seeds of tremendous art can germinate. Renaissance Italy – Donatello and Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Rafael; années folles Paris, Hemingway wandering down to Shakespeare and Company to drink with Ezra Pound after receiving the criticism of his newest novel from Gertrude Stein.
But there are also two kinds of environments, and this is where it perhaps becomes a little complicated. The 1920s in Paris, an open society, a boom of wealth in a town famous for its permissiveness in allowing the free flow of people as they came together to walk along the Seine. Florence, beautiful palaces and landscapes and the great largesse of the Medici’s, lovers of art who attracted talent as a moth to a flame. But Yerevan, Tbilisi – the Caucasus and Crimea in the early days of communism. A perfect venue for the writers – utopians all, of different stripes – poets and novelists who imagined that the arrival of the Bolsheviks meant for them a dawning of a new age. Was not the Tzar dead? Was not the great war over? Yegishe Charents and Gurgen Mahari and Zabel Yesayian and Vahan Totovents. And Aksel Bakunts. All sitting around the inner rooms of Aipetrat Publishing House in Yerevan discussing each other novels – the Inklings, who nobody ever heard of.
Because though moments can be propitious environments can turn toxic. Yerevan, a tiny pre-soviet town, backwater of a great empire, poor and speaking an almost undecipherable (though olden and beautiful) language. A great iron curtain slams down over them, oxygenless and sterile and denying them the avenue, Paris perhaps or Berlin, through which their talent would reach the wider western world. Then came the reigning years of Stalin’s paranoia, the Great Purge it was called, and the glorious spark of creativity was silently snuffed out.
Yegishe Charents was arrested and released and arrested again to disappear. Nobody even knows where his tomb lays. Gurgen Mahari, sent to Siberia for seventeen years. Aksel Bankunts – executed in 1937 after a twenty-five minute trial. The crimes of these once-extolled soviets? “An excess of nationalism”. They loved their religion, their language, and their little patch of land. They were not sufficiently loyal to soviet globalism (yes, that idea is not new). They still considered first the rugged gorges and darkened forests and ancient monasteries in which they rested their ideas of home.
I just finished Bakunts’ “The Dark Valley”, a collection of short stories only recently translated (2008) and available to the English-speaking world. It is exceedingly difficult to even find novels, poems and other works produced by these writers in English. I’ve found Mahari’s “Burning Orchards” (but can’t find “Blossoming Barbwire” in English, only French – to say nothing of his three-part autobiography). Bakunts has unfinished novels and some books of poetry – Yegishe Charent’s epic poem Dante, Gevorg Emin’s poetry – slammed behind a heavy iron curtain to never be seen again. Did not even Antonina Mahari attempt to sell the rights to “Barbwire” out of her poverty, and was told it was worthless?
“The Dark Valley” stories are best probably described as postcards from a century-old Armenia. They are simple stories about the animals and the valleys and the legends of the villages nestled timelessly, forever in the hinterlands of the southern Caucuses. There is something edgy, bitter about Bakunts. His stories are sad and often brutal, not love poems but ones of abuse and violence and death. His prose is not flowing, flowery and epic as is Mahari’s – his sentences are short and his style choppy, reminding me somewhat of Hemingway in his curt delivery. But there is so much about Armenia in his stories, about his desperation at how things are too slow to change and his love of that which still stays the same. After reading the stories, its clear why Stalin murdered him – for Aksel Bakunts had a rebellious streak that comes out clearly even in his stories; and he is not friendly to the hapless soviets and their attempts to create order out of societies who have spontaneously organized for so long in their mountain lands.
“The Dark Valley” deserves to be read; we must honor the writers of 100 years ago who dared to make their voices heard, who together wrote prose and threw out their seeds upon the infertile land of the Bolshevik revolution to have them there wither away and die. Bakunts was murdered for these stories, but Bolshevism is now also dead, and the stories have survived and have found new life!!! And for that we must let them live within us.
But there are also two kinds of environments, and this is where it perhaps becomes a little complicated. The 1920s in Paris, an open society, a boom of wealth in a town famous for its permissiveness in allowing the free flow of people as they came together to walk along the Seine. Florence, beautiful palaces and landscapes and the great largesse of the Medici’s, lovers of art who attracted talent as a moth to a flame. But Yerevan, Tbilisi – the Caucasus and Crimea in the early days of communism. A perfect venue for the writers – utopians all, of different stripes – poets and novelists who imagined that the arrival of the Bolsheviks meant for them a dawning of a new age. Was not the Tzar dead? Was not the great war over? Yegishe Charents and Gurgen Mahari and Zabel Yesayian and Vahan Totovents. And Aksel Bakunts. All sitting around the inner rooms of Aipetrat Publishing House in Yerevan discussing each other novels – the Inklings, who nobody ever heard of.
Because though moments can be propitious environments can turn toxic. Yerevan, a tiny pre-soviet town, backwater of a great empire, poor and speaking an almost undecipherable (though olden and beautiful) language. A great iron curtain slams down over them, oxygenless and sterile and denying them the avenue, Paris perhaps or Berlin, through which their talent would reach the wider western world. Then came the reigning years of Stalin’s paranoia, the Great Purge it was called, and the glorious spark of creativity was silently snuffed out.
Yegishe Charents was arrested and released and arrested again to disappear. Nobody even knows where his tomb lays. Gurgen Mahari, sent to Siberia for seventeen years. Aksel Bankunts – executed in 1937 after a twenty-five minute trial. The crimes of these once-extolled soviets? “An excess of nationalism”. They loved their religion, their language, and their little patch of land. They were not sufficiently loyal to soviet globalism (yes, that idea is not new). They still considered first the rugged gorges and darkened forests and ancient monasteries in which they rested their ideas of home.
I just finished Bakunts’ “The Dark Valley”, a collection of short stories only recently translated (2008) and available to the English-speaking world. It is exceedingly difficult to even find novels, poems and other works produced by these writers in English. I’ve found Mahari’s “Burning Orchards” (but can’t find “Blossoming Barbwire” in English, only French – to say nothing of his three-part autobiography). Bakunts has unfinished novels and some books of poetry – Yegishe Charent’s epic poem Dante, Gevorg Emin’s poetry – slammed behind a heavy iron curtain to never be seen again. Did not even Antonina Mahari attempt to sell the rights to “Barbwire” out of her poverty, and was told it was worthless?
“The Dark Valley” stories are best probably described as postcards from a century-old Armenia. They are simple stories about the animals and the valleys and the legends of the villages nestled timelessly, forever in the hinterlands of the southern Caucuses. There is something edgy, bitter about Bakunts. His stories are sad and often brutal, not love poems but ones of abuse and violence and death. His prose is not flowing, flowery and epic as is Mahari’s – his sentences are short and his style choppy, reminding me somewhat of Hemingway in his curt delivery. But there is so much about Armenia in his stories, about his desperation at how things are too slow to change and his love of that which still stays the same. After reading the stories, its clear why Stalin murdered him – for Aksel Bakunts had a rebellious streak that comes out clearly even in his stories; and he is not friendly to the hapless soviets and their attempts to create order out of societies who have spontaneously organized for so long in their mountain lands.
“The Dark Valley” deserves to be read; we must honor the writers of 100 years ago who dared to make their voices heard, who together wrote prose and threw out their seeds upon the infertile land of the Bolshevik revolution to have them there wither away and die. Bakunts was murdered for these stories, but Bolshevism is now also dead, and the stories have survived and have found new life!!! And for that we must let them live within us.
December 18, 2025
In my hunt for fiction from Armenia, I tracked down this collection of nineteen short stories, which presumably appeared in various newspapers or other periodicals before being published as a book in 1927. The author (real name Alexander Tevosyan), was trained as an agronomist and worked as such for several years in the Zangezur region around 1923-25, just after the establishment of Armenia as a Soviet republic in 1920. The stories here draw very heavily from his time in the field, forming a collage of backwater villages and landscapes on the cusp of transition to modernity and communist rule.
The stories tend to open with an evocation of the geography and flora and fauna of the setting, with streams, bears, rose-hips, chamois sheep, linden trees, centuries-old ruins of monasteries and fortresses, apricot trees, and on and on and on, beautifully described. Then come the people, generally herders, forresters, farmers, and their wives (almost always unnamed), struggling to scratch a living from the land, eating the same meals of lavash bread, yogurt soup, and cracked wheat. Sometimes modernity intrudes in the form of a Kommosol envoy spreading the good news of liberation from the czar, or a teacher from the city, or a machine of unknown purposes, or conscription to a distant war. The past echoes throughout, in the ruins of former kingdoms, Persian phrases and food, muddled interpretations of pre-Christian beliefs, and in one story only, the flight from genocide.
But these are not romantic visions -- these are keen-eyed observations of rural community, often at its harshest. It's a land where whips and cudgels are wielded, girls are married off as young as possible, priests are venal, and there is little to celebrate. There is a tension between the backwardness of these communities and their purity, and of course, the change looming on the horizon. These stories contain only a few kernels of political critique, but it's not hard to imagine the progression in writing that resulted in the author's arrest and execution ten years later in Stalin's horrors. Readers with an interest in modern Armenia should definitely seek out these fragments of a century ago.
The stories tend to open with an evocation of the geography and flora and fauna of the setting, with streams, bears, rose-hips, chamois sheep, linden trees, centuries-old ruins of monasteries and fortresses, apricot trees, and on and on and on, beautifully described. Then come the people, generally herders, forresters, farmers, and their wives (almost always unnamed), struggling to scratch a living from the land, eating the same meals of lavash bread, yogurt soup, and cracked wheat. Sometimes modernity intrudes in the form of a Kommosol envoy spreading the good news of liberation from the czar, or a teacher from the city, or a machine of unknown purposes, or conscription to a distant war. The past echoes throughout, in the ruins of former kingdoms, Persian phrases and food, muddled interpretations of pre-Christian beliefs, and in one story only, the flight from genocide.
But these are not romantic visions -- these are keen-eyed observations of rural community, often at its harshest. It's a land where whips and cudgels are wielded, girls are married off as young as possible, priests are venal, and there is little to celebrate. There is a tension between the backwardness of these communities and their purity, and of course, the change looming on the horizon. These stories contain only a few kernels of political critique, but it's not hard to imagine the progression in writing that resulted in the author's arrest and execution ten years later in Stalin's horrors. Readers with an interest in modern Armenia should definitely seek out these fragments of a century ago.
June 1, 2025
Հավանեցի Բակունցի գրելաոճը. պարզ, հստակ, իմաստալից։ Շատ լավ է նկարագրված դաժան Պանինի կերպարը, աշխատավոր գյուղացի` Ավիի կերպարը։
August 14, 2025
Country: Armenia
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