Short stories
The Dark Valley
Մթնաձոր
Aksel Bakunts · 1927
Opening lines
Մթնաձոր տանող միակ արահետն առաջին ձյունի հետ փակվում է, մինչև գարուն ոչ մի մարդ ոտք չի դնում անտառներում։
The only path leading to Mtnadzor closes with the first snow, and until spring no one sets foot in the forests.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from hy.wikisource.org
Synopsis
In a wooded valley of Zangezur where almost no one ventures, the forest ranger Panine, a hunter flanked by six dogs, appears behind the woodcutters and watches them fell the trees. The seventeen other stories belong to the same mountains: shepherds, women and peasants of the south of the country, in a nature described with precision.
Context
Its author had worked from 1924 to 1926 as an agronomist at Goris, and the book comes out of this fieldwork: the valleys, the flocks and the villages are seen in it by someone who travelled through them for his job. The story that gives the volume its title had appeared in a Yerevan daily on 21 November 1926, before being revised for the collection. The precision of the language and the absence of idealisation kept at a distance the doctrine that was taking hold at the time, and this was later a charge against him.
Who it is for
Short, to be taken story by story. The landscapes of Zangezur count as much as the people who cross them.
Prizes and reception
The collection that made its author known; his stories were reprinted in Paris as early as 1938 and in Beirut in 1955, when he was proscribed at home.