“Charents’ Land of Nairi and the Poetics of the City in the Symbolist Novel”

This article examines Land of Nairi, the only novel of the poet Yeghishe Charents, in the context of the Symbolist tradition. Although Charents’ earliest work (1912-1917) is considered perhaps the purest expression of Symbolist aesthetics in Armenian poetry, it has generally been accepted that Charents had decisively rejected his early artistic approach by the time of the novel’s composition. This study concludes that Land of Nairi exhibits certain hallmarks of Symbolist prose, namely a recondite revelation concealed under layers of multigeneric discourse and communicated in part by direct address from author to reader. Especially striking parallels exist between the narrative texture and symbolic framework of Land of Nairi and those of Petersburg by Andrei Bely, whose poetry exerted a discernible influence on Charents’s early work. Both authors create a spiritual topography overlapping the physical urban landscape, creating the impression that the city pursues obscure ends of its own, exerting a fatal and illusory power over its naïve inhabitants, including the narrators themselves. While Charents’s indebtedness to Bely should not be overstated, the resemblance between the two novels provides an entry point for reinterpretation of Land of Nairi as a continuation, rather than a rejection, of Charents’s early Symbolist tendencies.