Russell to Speak at Fresno State

FRESNO, Calif.—On Wed., March 16, Dr. James Russell, the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, will speak on “Misak Medzarents: Songs of Freedom, Defiance, and Joy” at 7:30 p.m. in the University Business Center, Alice Peters Auditorium, Rm. 191, on the Fresno State campus.

The lecture is part of the Armenian Studies Program Spring Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the Armenian Students Organization at Fresno State. The Associated Students, Inc. at Fresno State have provided partial funding for the lecture.

The Western Armenian poet Misak Medzarents, who died of consumption in 1908 at the tender age of 22, was in his linguistic and imaginative genius the rightful successor to Bedros Tourian, who had invented modern Armenian verse almost single-handed and died in 1872 at 20 of the same disease.

Tourian raged against his cruel and untimely destiny; Medzarents foresaw the same; and neither ever enjoyed reciprocal love. But Medzarents’ poems, layered in the complex cadences and imagery of some two millennia of Armenian poetics, explode with a pantheistic vision of nature. They are suffused with a deep inner delight. His palette is bright and vivid, and can remind an English-speaking reader of William Blake or Walt Whitman. Why is this? What made him so different a man and an artist? Russell believes that part of the explanation is to be sought in his native village, a remote, fortified, hidden place where, mysteriously and almost miraculously, Armenians preserved their freedom for a thousand years.

James R. Russell is the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies in the department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Harvard University. He has authored over 100 scholarly articles, many of which have been collected in his Armenian and Iranian Studies (2004). In addition to seminal investigations into the pre-Christian Iranian heritage of Armenian culture (Zoroastrianism in Armenia, 1987), Russell has pioneered research into Armenian epic (The Heroes of Kasht, 2000), medieval Armenian poetry (Yovhannes T‘lkuranc‘i and the Mediaeval Armenian Lyric Tradition, 1987), and modern Armenian poetry (The Book of Flowers, 2003). He is most recently the author of a study on and translation of the collected poems of Bedros Tourian entitled Bosphorus Nights (2006).

The lecture is free and open to the public. Relaxed parking will be available in the UBC (University Business Center) parking lot after 7 p.m. For more information, contact the Armenian Studies Program at (559) 278-2669.