Dashtents, Khachik

(pseudonym of K. T. Tonoian). Born Apr. 15, 1909, in the village of Dashtaian, Sasun Vilayet, Western Armenia. Soviet Armenian writer. Born into the family of a herdsman.

Dashtents graduated from Yerevan State University in 1932 and the Foreign Language Institute in Moscow in 1940. In the collections of poems Book of Songs (1932), Spring Songs (1934), The Flame (1936), and Mountain Flowers (1963). he describes the everyday life of his native land and confirms the moral grandeur of the Soviet man. The novel Khodedan (1950) depicts the tragedy of Western Armenians during the period of World War I. Dashtents wrote the historical drama Tigran the Great (1947) and translated Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha and many of Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies.