Levon Georgievich Manvelian

Born Dec. 3, 1864; died Feb. 21, 1919. Armenian writer and literary historian.

Manvelian graduated from the department of history and philology of Moscow University in 1889. He worked as a teacher at the Echmiadzin Theological Academy.

Manvelian’s collection Verses and Poems (books 1-2, 1899-1907) and his dramatic poems Galileo and Milton (1895; published 1899) and Upward (1902) are imbued with the enthusiasm of the struggle against obscurantism and despotism. The long poem David of Sasun and Msra-Melik (1905) is one of the best literary treatments of the Armenian epic. The novel A Broken Life (1897) depicts the tragic situation of people in the arts in bourgeois society. Manvelian translated A. S. Griboedov’s Woe From Wit into Armenian (1913). He is the author of The History of the Literature of the Russian Armenians (parts 1-4; 2nd ed., 1909-17).