Soseh B․ Poghosian (New Jugha, Iran)
Poet Stepanos Dashtetsi from New Jugha lived and worked in the second quarter of
the 17th – the first quarter of the 18th cc. During the forced deportation carried out by Shah
Abbas, his parents have been resettled from Dasht village of the Goght canton to
New Jugha, where he was born. The pseudonym Dashtetsi has been taken from here.
Dashtetsi received education at Amenaprkich Monastery of New Jugha, he was a student
of Stepanos Jughayetsi and was specialized in philosophy and theology. After
receiving the primary education in Isfahan, he studied at the high school of Vatican in Rome.
He mastered Old Armenian, Persian, Turkish, Georgian languages, as well as Latin
and Hindi.
In the beginning, Dashtetsi was a priest but later, due to some circumstances, he became a
merchant. He visited many countries: he was in Persia, India, Turkey, Greece, Italy and a
number of European countries. During his travels, he saw and learned a lot, and in this
connection he became circumspect, experienced, patient and wise.
The theological and polemical works of the author are most popular. Meanwhile, his
image as a literary and public figure would be incomplete without studying his poetry.
In the article we have examined Dashtetsi’s poems, which have been divided into
three groups: a) satirical and condemnatory; b) instructive and philosophical; c) love.
In the poems of the first group, he, ridiculing and condemning, points to the common
delusions among the inhabitants of New Jugha: hypocrisy, greed, worship of everything
foreign, ignorance and envy. In the poems of the second group, he tries to enlighten the
society through moral teachings. His poems on these two main topics are written mostly in
the eastern form of Tajnis in the New Jugha dialect.
Love songs stand out among the poems of Dashtetsi. They continue the traditions of
the medieval poetry with their depiction of the external appearance of the object of love and
suffering caused by the devotion of a lover.
17 poems of Stepanos Dashtetsi that have reached us with their content, form and
language are of great value both for the Armenian literary criticism and for the
dialectology, as well as for the study of the history of Armenian culture.