Armenian literature, the whole of Armenian cultural life and Armenian social and political thought have suffered a grave loss: in the eighty-third year of his fruitful life, Sero Khanzadyan has died—the writer, the publicist, the public figure.
His hoarse, audacious, commanding voice will no longer be heard in the crowded squares. Armenia’s spaces of earth and time will no longer bear the footsteps of this fighter and scholar, this scout and chronicler, this geographer and man of letters. Tomorrow’s pioneer of Armenian literature and Armenian history will no longer expect his encouraging call from behind. Today, on this June day in 1998, his accomplished, weary life has fallen behind the eternal procession of his people.
He was born in 1915, in Goris. He endured a hard childhood and adolescence, and a youth harder still. Yet that hardship, bordering on cruelty, seemed to have been designed expressly to forge a resilient, victorious fighter. He had to survive and struggle to reclaim the victories lost by his ancestor, the ancestor of us all, and he had to fight to live the lives his ancestor and ours had never lived.
The Men of Our Regiment, The Land, Mkhitar Sparapet, Chronicle of Events, Kajaran, The Queen of the Armenians, With My Father and Without My Father, frontline diaries, Andranik, Nzhdeh—from 1949 onwards, not one year in his literary field knew drought, and literary, social and political life never knew his absence or silence.
A witness to years of hunger and intellectual barrenness, he thirsted to raise a monument of culture out of himself, and he raised it. We see its true dimensions, its true importance, today; tomorrow we shall feel them in our empty squares, forever deprived of his voice, his wildness, his wisdom, his courage and his good judgement.