Bakunts, Aksel

Born June 13 (25), 1899, in Goris; died 1938. Soviet Armenian writer.

Bakunts was born into a peasant family. In 1923 he graduated from the Kharkov Agricultural Institute. He was the chief agronomist of the Zangezur district. His works were first published in 1918. In his collection of novellas and short stories In a Dark Gorge (1927), Bakunts portrayed the working life of the prerevolutionary Armenian peasantry. In his collection of short stories Sowers of Black Fields (1933) he imparted the tense atmosphere of revolutionary struggle in Armenia, depicted heroes of the Civil War, and showed the people’s love of labor and their endurance. Bakunts was a poet of Armenian nature and an authority on the popular colloquial language. He was the author of the brilliant short stories “The Cyclamen,” “The Pheasant,” “Lar-Markar,” “Letter to the Russian Tsar,” “Muro’s Conversation,” “The White Horse,” “The Nut Tree of Brotherhood,” “The Potter’s Son,” and “The Decline of the Province.” In the novella Ovnatan March (1927), Bakunts exposed bourgeois nationalists. In his satirical chronicle Kiores (1935) he depicted the mores of a provincial small town. Bakunts did not complete the novels Khachatur Abovian and Karmrakar.(Several chapters were published.) He wrote several scenarios, among them Under the Black Wing and Zangezur.