Novel
Chaos
Քաոս
Alexander Shirvanzade · 1898
Opening lines
Մարկոս աղա Ալիմյանը ծանր հիվանդ էր։
Markos Agha Alimyan was seriously ill.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from hy.wikisource.org
Synopsis
In Baku, at the end of the century, old Markos agha Alimian dies leaving a will that puts each of his sons on notice. The eldest must repudiate his Russian wife so that his children may inherit; the second will receive his share only if he returns to the religion of his own people and marries an Armenian woman.
Context
The author later said he wrote this book under the influence of the chaotic situation of a family he had known, and in it he depicts the birth of Baku's oil industry, a city where he had worked as a young man. The manuscript waited for months in a printing house in Tiflis, for lack of money to pay for it; the book appeared in early 1898, when its author had just been banished to Odessa. The novel has been adapted for the screen in Soviet Armenia.
Who it is for
Long, with many characters, and money explains almost everything in it. It is read as a picture of Baku rather than as a tightly driven plot.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the masterpiece of the Armenian realist novel, and the major book of its author.