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Tlgadintsi


Tlgadintsi or Tlkatintsi (Armenian: Թլկատինցի), Hovhannes Harutiunian (Armenian: Հովհաննես Հարությունյան, 1860, Tlkatin village, Kharpert, Western Armenia -1915) was an Armenian writer and teacher noted for his leading role in rural literature. He is credited with giving the first authoritative response to a call from Constantinople's Armenian intelligentsia, issued in the early 1890s, for writing firmly rooted in the village life of historic Western Armenia. His unique realist works range from probing the darkest corners of village life to revisiting cherished moments of childhood. Through his esteem as a mentor and his power as a writer he opened the way for a new generation of important writers such as Rupen Zartarian, Peniamin Noorigian, Vahé Haig, Vahan Totovents, Hamasdegh, and others.

He was born in 1860 in the village of Tlgadin (present-day Kuyulu) ten miles south of Kharpert. His father was a farmer who died when Tlgandintsi was quite young, leaving him and his mother in poverty. Despite their misfortune his mother persevered and enrolled him in the parish school to begin his education. On finishing the parish school he continued his education at the Smpadian School in Kharpert, where his courses included classical Armenian, grammar, geography, and mathematics.

By 1878 he had completed his studies at the Smpadian School and embarked on his dual career as village schoolmaster and journalist, this in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 which had left the Armenian populace of the Ottoman Empire in widespread misery. He found his first teaching position in the village of Chunkoush (Çüngüş), and he established himself as a writer with the reports he sent to the Constantinople newspapers "Arevelk" and "Masis" through the 1880s. In 1893, responding to the call of Constantinople's Armenian literati, he emerged as a distinctive new voice in fiction with the publication in the newspaper "Hairenik" of Emily, a satirical sketch about an American missionary and her activities in an Armenian village. This work, the first he signed with the name "Tlgadintsi", was welcomed by the critics and enthusiastically received by the readers.

Tlgadintsi spent his whole life in the immediate environs of Kharpert. His stories focus exclusively on the psychology, values and interpersonal relationships of completely ordinary villagers. In an era when thousands of his compatriots were abandoning their homeland for America, he stood staunchly opposed to the wave of emigration. He also took a dim view of the famed revolutionary parties of his day and was never affiliated with any of them. At the same time, he was seriously concerned with the inroads that missionary Protestantism was making among Armenians, an issue at the core of Just One Glass.


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