Summary
Yervand G. Ter-Khachatryan
Key words – Ara Heryan, Batum, ship, mountain, Yerevan, Sevan, “Albatross”, Zvart, Tumanyan, Miranyan, Kanaker.
The article is devoted to the novel “The ship on the mountain” by Kostan Zarian – one of the major figures of Armenian literature of the twentieth century.
The novel was written just before the Second World War and was published in 1943, in Boston. The novel shows the difficult situation in Armenia and the Armenian reality in 1918-1920. The novel is the most significant work of the author, because it sums up the artistic expression of the sacred and revered idea of a thinker, artist and philosopher, an idea that was developed over decades, the idea concerning the fate and suffering of the Armenian people. His philosophy, his approach to the complex and unresolved issues of the Armenian reality are shown with the help of the main character of the novel – Ara Heryan. For this purpose, the article provides a detailed image of Ara Heryan. This image is the legacy of the writer, his testament for future generations.
The other characters of the novel are also quite significant – i. e. Petros Mark, Peronyan and others. It is extremely important that the readers may feel and see the image of life of Armenians at a concrete historical time – in 1918-1920.
As for the literary and artistic integrity of the novel, we would like to note the author’s artistic thinking, his poetics.
In this article, we took into account almost all the literary material relating to the novel, also some incomplete and one-sided interpretations. The author of the article made an attempt to read correctly the novel by Konstan Zarian and tried to interprete the idea and the implementation of the writer in a right way.