Summary
Haroutiun L. Kurkjian (Athens)
The paper examines the work and personality of Ler Kamsar, the satirical author born in 1888 in Van (Western Armenia, present-day Turkey) who lived for most of his life in Soviet Armenia. Because of his unconstrained character and nature of his work, he was subjected to persecution and exile and later condemned to silence until his death in 1965.
Ler Kamsar’s published writings of the 1920s and 1930s were placed under censure; due to his subsequent arrest and exile his unpublished works were partially lost or destroyed. It was only in the 1980s and more prominently at the end of the 1990s that his works were once again published.
The publications of the last decade are from those unpublished “underground” works which were saved and were made possible through the undertaking of his relatives and which reveal a gifted satirist and a brave dissident on a pan-Soviet level, and disclose a powerful moral individuality.
The current work is an attempt to outline a literary analysis and a moral and ethical image; a call for the reevaluation of Ler Kamsar’s universal worth.