Jennifer Manoukian
The following is a translation of the first chapter of a novel by Nigoghos Sarafian entitled "The Princess." Originally written in Western Armenian, the novel was published in 1934 in Paris.
Between the wars, Paris replaced Constantinople as the center of Western Armenian intellectual life. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, France served as one of the largest havens for Armenians and its capital provided exiled Armenian writers and intellectuals, in particular, with a space to revive Armenian literary culture. This literary culture had been all but decimated in 1915 by the Armenian genocide, during which the intellectual leadership of the Ottoman Armenian community was almost entirely eliminated. Those writers who went on to initiate the literary revival in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s were of a younger generation that had experienced the genocide and its aftermath as young men. They had been educated in the Armenian schools of Constantinople during the Allied occupation between 1918 and 1922 by the few surviving writers of the old guard, before both teachers and students were forced to flee the advancing nationalist forces that would eventually claim Constantinople and establish the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
