Burning Orchards

"This is an exceptional novel which deserves to be much more widely read, it’s beautifully written by a very talented writer with an extraordinary story. Gurgen Mahari grew up in Van in the Ottoman Empire then went to Russian Armenia – then in the Soviet Union – and spent many years as a political prisoner in the Gulag. He came back to Yerevan and then wrote this novel, which is basically an autobiographical novel about Van in 1915, which was the epicentre of a lot of Armenian-Turkish violence. It’s subversive because it’s not a martyrology, it’s not a story of Armenian victimhood. It’s told very much from the inside and it’s very satirical about the Armenian revolutionary parties and about the role they played in provoking and precipitating Turkish violence. This aspect of the novel was very controversial for the period in which it was published, the 60s, when Soviet Armenians were just rediscovering their political-national consciousness. This subversive take on the Armenian national idea was too much for the Yerevan of that period and Mahari was forced to withdraw the book from the publishers, some people even burned copies of the book. He re-submitted a self-censored version of this novel, his life’s work. But, by the sound of it, the experience broke him; he died a few years later. That’s right. The complete version was fortunately published much later. When we have a great tragic event, a great atrocity – and I think the Armenian Genocide was the worst atrocity of the First World War – there is a tendency to sanctify it, to make the event into a pure morality tale. For me, that forms a barrier towards our human understanding of it. These five books – four memoirs , one autobiographical novel – bring us back to the human story, the fact that Turks could be good or bad, the fact that Armenians could be brave or not so brave, the choices people made, and the fact that this was history unfolding in real time. These extraordinary events of war and destruction throw up incredible human stories. They tell us the story in a way that some of the dry history, and certainly the political propaganda about these events do not."