Otian, Eruand

Born Sept. 19, 1869, in Istanbul; died Oct. 3, 1926, in Cairo. Armenian writer.

Otian was educated at home. Together with other Armenian cultural figures, he was persecuted in sultan-ruled Turkey, and in 1915 he was exiled to the Arabian Desert. He welcomed the establishment of Soviet power in Armenia.

Otian began publishing publicistic and critical works in 1887 and writing imaginative prose in 1892. He attacked despotism and the corrupt morals of bourgeois society in such novels as The Priest Go-Between (1895) and The Family, Honor, and Morality (1910). His novels Abdul Hamid and Sherlock Holmes (1911) and Salikha Khanum (1912) reflected the struggle of the peoples of Turkey against the sultans’ tyranny. Otian also wrote topical satires, pamphlets, such satirical stories as Parasites of the Revolution (1898–99), and such novellas as The Propagandist (1901) and Comrade P’andzhuni (1908). He translated L. N. Tolstoy’s War and Peace into Armenian, and his own works have been translated into many languages.