This is sufficiently abstruse that I found the supporting material helpful. A five page introduction by the translator sketches the lives of the two writers. Yesayan was accused of nationalism in the Great Purge in 1937 and died in a Soviet prison sometime in 1943. Kurghinian had her revolutionary works celebrated but her feminism ignored, and was forgotten after the end of the Soviet Union.
There are also ten pages of "chapter guides".
Chapter 12, "A Short Chapter," is an imagined reflection by Yesayan on the death of her friend, the writer Vahan Totovents, written from her prison cell. "Areni" refers to a type of Armenian sweet or dry red wine that is produced in a village of the same name, in the province of Vayots Dzor in the Armenian republic; lavash is a type of circular, thin flat bread made throughout the Caucasus and the Middle East, and is baked on the inside wall of a tonir, a large underground ceramic vase; Shirak is one of the provinces of Armenia; finally, the Feast of the Holy Translators refers to the holiday in the Armenian Apostolic Church that celebrates the literary figures and saints who founded the Armenian alphabet, translated the Bible, and began a movement to translate important literary works into the Armenian language in the fifth century.
And a thirty page afterword by the translator gets even more theoretical, to the extent that it feels pretty much like an academic paper.
This may seem esoteric in the extreme, and to fully appreciate it I think readers will need at least some interest in Soviet and Armenian literary history and in the mysteries of translation and historical research. But one can just "go with the flow" and not get involved with such matters as the differences between Eastern and Western Armenian.
February 2025
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