Zabel Yesayan (Armenian: Զապել Եսայան (reformed), Զապէլ Եսայեան (classical); February 4, 1878 – 1943) was an Armenian writer and an important person in the Armenian academic and political community during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Zabel Yesayan wrote books, articles, and gave speeches about many topics, including the Adana massacre, the Armenian genocide, and the situation of Armenian women. She also worked as a translator in France and later taught as a professor. Her novels and writings helped people understand the suffering of Turkish Armenians, the effects after World War I, and the roles and rights of women in the Ottoman and Armenian communities.

Biography

Zabel Hovannessian, the daughter of Mkrtich Hovannessian, was born on the night of February 4, 1878, in the Silahdar neighborhood of Scutari, Istanbul, during the Russo-Turkish War. She attended Holy Cross (Ս. Խաչ) elementary school and graduated in 1892.

In 1895, she was among the first women from Istanbul to study abroad. She moved to Paris, where she studied literature and philosophy at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. Inspired by the French Romantic movement and the revival of Armenian literature in the Western Armenian dialect, she began a writing career. Her work helped support the Armenian intellectual movement called Zartonk (the awakening), along with other female authors such as Srpuhi Dussap and Zabel Asatur (Sibyl).

While in Paris, she married the painter Dikran Yesayan (1874–1921). They had two children, Sophie and Hrant. After the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, Yesayan returned to Istanbul. In 1909, Yesayan was appointed to the Armenian Constantinople Patriarchate's Commission and sent to Cilicia to examine the situation. Yesayan published a series of articles about the Adana massacres. The tragic fate of Armenians in Cilicia is also the subject of her book In the Ruins (Աւերակներու մէջ, Istanbul 1911), the novella The Curse (1911), and the short stories "Safieh" (1911) and "The New Bride" (1911).

Attacks on Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during World War I placed Yesayan’s life in danger. She was the only woman on the list of Armenian intellectuals targeted for arrest and deportation by the Ottoman Young Turk government on April 24, 1915.

Yesayan avoided arrest and fled to Bulgaria and later to Baku and the Caucasus, where she worked with Armenian refugees, documenting their eyewitness accounts of atrocities during the Armenian genocide. Yesayan’s son stayed with her mother in Constantinople while her husband and daughter were in France. Yesayan reunited with her family in France in 1919 after the war. After World War I, she returned to Cilicia with her children to help Armenian refugees and orphans.

Yesayan visited Soviet Armenia in 1926 and shortly afterward published her impressions in Prometheus Unchained (Պրոմէթէոս ազատագրուած, Marseilles, 1928). In 1933, she decided to settle permanently in Soviet Armenia with her children. In 1934, she participated in the first Soviet Writers’ Union congress in Moscow. She taught French and Armenian literature at Yerevan State University and continued to write prolifically.

During Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, Yesayan was accused of "counterrevolutionary agitation" and arrested on June 27, 1937. She was held without trial for one and a half years. During her trial, Yesayan only admitted to having connections with individuals deemed enemies of the state. She was exiled to prisons in Yerevan and Baku. She died under unknown circumstances. There is speculation that she drowned and died in exile in Siberia sometime in 1943. In 1956, Yesayan’s son, Hrant Yesayan, asked that her case be reevaluated. One of her cellmates, Karine Gyulikekhvyan, testified that new accusations were brought against her after each interrogation. Yesayan’s case was dismissed due to lack of evidence on September 27, 1956, and she was posthumously rehabilitated on January 9, 1957, during the Khrushchev Thaw.

Early literary career

In the late 1800s in Constantinople, women like Srpuhi Dussap and Gayaneh Matakian organized Armenian gatherings where people could talk about ideas, books, and politics. These gatherings also allowed women to meet men without being judged as behaving improperly. Yesayan often attended the gathering led by Gayaneh Matakian. There, Yesayan met other writers and activists, including Sibyl and Arshak Chobanian, who was her first publisher. Yesayan published her first prose poem, "Ode to the Night," which appeared in Chobanian's magazine Tsaghik (Flower) in 1895. Her first novel, Sbasman Srahin Mech (In the Waiting Room, 1903), was also published in parts in Tsaghik. The book discussed women's experiences with moving to France and facing poverty. In 1903, the word "feminism" first appeared in Armenian in Yesayan's article in the Women's section of Tsaghik. She later published short stories, essays, articles, and translations in both French and Armenian in magazines such as Mercure de France, L'Humanité, Massis, Anahit, Arevelian Mamoul (Eastern Press), Ecrit pour l'Art, La Grande France, Tzolk (Light), Mer Ugin (Our Way), and Arşav (Race).

Political activism

Yesayan used her writing and voice to reveal wartime atrocities and to support Armenian sovereignty and women's rights. One of her less well-known works, Krakedi Më Hishadagner (Memories of a Writer, 1915), written in Bulgaria, describes Ottoman Turkish executions of important Armenians on April 24, 1915. Because it was dangerous to publish the piece, Yesayan used the male pen-name Viken to keep her identity hidden.

In 1918, Yesayan was in the Middle East helping to move refugees and orphans to safer places. This time in her life inspired the novels The Last Cup (Վերջին բաժակը) and My Soul in Exile (Հոգիս աքսորեալ, 1919; translated into English by G.M. Goshgarian in 2014), in which she describes the many injustices she saw.

After the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian National Delegation traveled to the Paris Peace Conference to argue for Armenian sovereignty. Yesayan was chosen to join the Armenian National Delegation. In 1919, Yesayan gave a speech in French titled The Role of the Armenian Woman during the War (Հայ Կնոջ Դերը Պատերազմի Միջոցին) to show peace delegates the destruction caused by the genocide and to explain how Armenian women fought to protect themselves. During the Paris Peace Conference, Yesayan also met with the Inter-Allied Women's Conference to discuss the suffering Armenian women endured because of the genocide. The Inter-Allied Women's Conference shared Yesayan’s testimony with the delegation as additional proof of the need for international women’s rights.

Yesayan also spoke up for Armenian women, challenging traditional ideas about gender roles and expectations, such as education and work. In the publications When They Are No Longer in Love and The Last Cup (1917), Yesayan used her fiction to discuss the challenges women faced. Like other female activists, Yesayan encouraged Armenian women to participate in public life.

Later works

While visiting Soviet Armenia, Yesayan described the social and political situations in her novel Retreating Forces (Նահանջող ուժեր, 1923). A short time later, she wrote about her experiences in Prometheus Unchained (Պրոմէթէոս ազատագրուած, Marseilles, 1928). After moving to Armenia with her children, she published a novella titled Shirt of Fire (Կրակէ շապիկ, Yerevan, 1934; translated into Russian in 1936) and her autobiographical book The Gardens of Silihdar (Սիլիհտարի պարտէզները, Yerevan, 1935; translated into English by Jennifer Manoukian in 2014).

Recognition

Lara Aharonian, the founder of the Women's Resource Center of Armenia, and Talin Suciyan, the Yerevan correspondent for the Turkish Armenian newspaper Agos, made a documentary film about Zabel Yesayan titled Finding Zabel Yesayan. The film was released with the help of Utopiana and was first shown on March 7, 2009.

In her MA thesis titled Censorship, otherness and feminism: the silenced figure of Zabel Yesayan (2013), Vardush Hovsepyan Vardanyan worked to bring attention to Zabel Yesayan, an Armenian writer and activist whose name had been forgotten.

A street in Paris was renamed after Zabel Yesayan on March 8, 2018, during International Women's Day.

In a 2019 interview, Turkish writer Elif Shafak said that Zabel Yesayan's book In the Ruins was her "favorite book no one else has heard of." Shafak described the book as a "heart-rending cry, an important chronicle. A very important read."

In 2022, a life-size monument honoring Zabel Yesayan was unveiled in the village of Proshyan, Kotayk Province of the Republic of Armenia, near the Zapel Esayan Agribusiness Center. That same year, an organization named after Zabel Yesayan, the Yesayan Culture and Literature Association, was established in Istanbul. The association is connected to Aras Publishing Company, which was founded by Armenians in Turkey.

Posthumous publications

The Armenian International Women's Association (AIWA) published several of Yesayan's works in the literary journal Pangaryus. These works were part of AIWA's series called Treasury of Armenian Women's Literature. The materials were chosen from three volumes of Yesayan's writings that had been translated into English. The published works included "My Home," which is a part of Yesayan's memoir titled "The Gardens of Silihdar." Another work was "In the Ruins," a first-hand description of the Adana massacre in 1909. A mystery story titled "The Man" was also published. This story had previously appeared in a collection called "My Soul in Exile and Other Writings." In 2023, the Gomidas Institute published Zabel Yessayan's work titled "On the Threshold: Key Texts on Armenians and Turks as Ottoman Subjects."

List of works

• The Waiting Room (1903)
• The Obedients and the Rebels (1906)
• Phony Geniuses (1909)
• In the Ruins: The 1909 Massacres of Armenians in Adana, Turkey (1911)
• Enough! (1912-1913)
• Memories of a Writer (1915)
• The Agony of a People (1917)
• The Last Cup (1917)
• Murad's Journey from Sivas to Batum (1920)
• Le Role de la Femme Armenienne pendant la Guerre (The Role of Armenian Women During the War) (1922)
• My Soul in Exile (1922)
• Retreating Forces (1923)
• Prometheus Unchained (1928)
• Meliha Nuri Hanim (1928)
• Shirt of Flame (1934)
• The Gardens of Silihdar (1935)
• Uncle Khachik (1936)

• Member of the Union of Women Supporting Education
• Member of the Union of Nationalist Armenian Women
• President of Üsgüdari hay Dignants Ingerutyun (Üsküdar Women's Society)
• Member of Alliance universelle des femmes pour la Paix par l'Éducation, France (International Women's Alliance for Peace Through Education), France
• Member of Soviet Writers Union, Armenia