PRESS RELEASE
Haigazian University
Mira Yardemian, Public Relations Director
Mexique Street, Kantari, Beirut
P.O.Box. 11-1748
Riad El Solh 1107 2090
Tel: 01-353010/1/2
01-349230/1
Professor Marc Nichanian lectures on: "Hagop Oshagan in the Tchanghere
Prison"
Beirut, March 18, 2008- Renowned Professor Marc Nichanian, delivered his
second public lecture entitled, "Hagop Oshagan in the Prison of
Tchangere," on March 12, in Haigazian University Auditorium, among a
capacity audience of Armenian intel-lec-tuals, writers, faculty,
staff and students.
Dr. Nichanian, who is currently a visiting professor in the Armenian
Studies Depart-ment, presented his lecture as being an echo of the
questions raised in his most recent French volume, Le Roman de la
Catastrophe, to be published in 2008 by the publish-ing house
MétisPresse in Geneva.
The event opened with the welcoming words of the University’s Public
Relations Dir-ec-tor, Mira Yardemian, who briefly introduced the
educational and teaching back-ground of the guest speaker Marc
Nichanian, in addition to naming his various pub-lica-tions in
French, English and Armenian languages.
The topic of Marc Nichanian’s lecture was the unwritten part of
Oshagan’s novel Mnasortats, of which only the first two parts have been
published. As it is well known, Oshagan was un-able to write the third
part of the novel, in which he purported to "approach the Catastrophe."
After presenting Oshagan’s biography and describing the general features
of his novelistic output, Marc Nichanian reviewed the reasons given by
Oshagan for this failure and proposed a reading of the scarce passages
(spread in Panorama of Western-Armenian literature), where Oshagan gives
an idea of what he intended to do in this third part of the novel. One
of these passages was supposed to give an account of the "last" night of
the Armenian intellectuals, these "princes of the spirit," in Tchangere.
The latter is the ill-famed place in Turkey where most of the arrested
Ar-men-ian intellectuals during the round-up of April 24 were
deported. Very few survived. Of course, Hagop Oshagan was not arrested
on April 24 and has never been in Tchangere. In this respect, the
audience was very curiously listening to Nichanian, in order to decode
the mystery of Hagop Oshagan’s sojourn in the "Prison of Tchangere."