Nar-Dos

(pseudonym of Mikael Zakhar’evich Ovanisian). Born Mar. 1(13), 1867, in Tbilisi; died there July 13, 1933. Soviet Armenian writer. People’s Writer of Armenia and Georgia (1927).

In 1884, Nar-Dos became editorial secretary for the newspaper Nor Dar. His novella Anna Saroyan (1888) brought him recognition. The themes of rejection and suffering emerge in his story cycle Our Block (1888–94). Nar-Dos did not idealize the old patriarchal order, yet at the same time could not reconcile himself to bourgeois society. The novellas I and He (1889), The Slain Dove (1898), and One of the Hard Days (1904) are written in the humanistic tradition.

Nar-Dos depicted typical representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia, for example, in his novel Struggle (1911). His novel Death (begun 1888; published 1912) reflects a search for a solution to basic social problems. Under Soviet power, Nar-Dos wrote the novellas Missing in Action (1930) and The Last Mohicans (1930) and worked on the novel The New Man (excerpts published 1928; separate edition 1935), in which he affirmed the ideals of the new world.