Birth of Axel Bakunts (June 13, 1899)

Axel Bakunts was one of the most distinguished short story writers of the early period of Soviet Armenian literature and a victim of Stalin’s purges. 

He was born Alexander Tevosian on June 13, 1899, in Goris, Siunik. The region of Syunik would feature prominently in his short stories. He was an excellent student, and he was admitted to the Gevorgian Seminary of Holy Etchmiadzin in 1910, tuition-free, after more than a hundred villagers made pleas to the Catholicos. His first article was a satirical account of the mayor of Goris. It was published in Shushi in 1915 and earned him a stint in jail. He worked as a teacher in the village school of Lor, near Sisian, in 1915-1916. After graduating from the seminary in 1917, Bakunts served as a volunteer at the the front against the Ottoman advance and participated in the battle of Sardarabad. Between 1918 and 1919, he was a teacher, proofreader, and reporter in Yerevan. He studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Tiflis and agriculture at the Kharkov Institute in Ukraine from 1920 to 1923.  

He returned to Armenia and worked as an agronomist in Goris (1924-1926). He moved to Yerevan and was assistant head of the Land Committee in the People’s Commissariat for Land Affairs in 1926-1931. He worked for the periodical Majkal (1927-1928) and participated in the organization of the Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine in 1928. Meanwhile, he established his literary reputation with his first collection of short stories, The Dark Valley (1927). After 1931, he devoted himself to literature. He went on to publish several more collections, among them The White Horse (1927), The Sower of Fallow Land (1933), and Rain (1935). He also published the novels Hovnatan March (1927) and Kyores (1936). He also published a book about the disappearance of Khachatur Abovian (1932) and wrote a novel about the writer, of which only a fragment was published. He authored the screenplays Zangezur and The Son of the Sun and translated Nikolai Gogol’s novel Taras Bulba.  

Axel Bakunts, a close colleague and friend of poet Yeghishe Charents, was one of the first to fall victim to the Great Purge in Armenia. He was arrested on August 9, 1936, and shot on July 8, 1937, after a perfunctory trial that lasted twenty–five minutes. He was rehabilitated in 1955. His childhood house in Goris became a museum dedicated to his life and work in 1968. Nowadays it operates as a branch of the Yeghishe Charents Museum of Literature and Arts.