Audiobook Narration

"Land of Nairi" (1921) is the first major prose work by the classic of Armenian literature, poet, and translator Yeghishe Charents, and his only novel. A sharp, satirical, and at the same time tragic work, it both mourns the fate of Armenia and its people and mocks the characteristic nationalist types of the early twentieth century who were driving the country toward ruin under the pretext of revolutionary activity. Land of Nairi is an allegorical history of the “Nairian” people through the example of Charents’s native city, Kars: a history of their hopes and disillusionments, rises and falls. Charents himself was a passionate poet of the struggle for the liberation of his homeland, very much a voice of his age; everything described in the novel passed through the prism of his own perception. He turned the sorrowful into the comic, concealing behind laughter an endless tragedy and a hope for renewal.

The novel was first published as a separate Russian-language edition by Goslitizdat in 1926 in M. Khachatryants’s translation. This audiobook was recorded from that edition and translation. The novel was later republished as a separate book in 1935 (Goslitizdat) and in 1960 (Yerevan: Haypetrat), and was also included several times in collected volumes together with other works (1964, 1975).

"Jamal the Unfortunate" is the only major prose work by the classic of Kazakh literature, poet, journalist, and one of the leaders of the Kazakh national liberation movement, Mirjaqyp Dulatuly. Despite its relatively modest length, scholars of literature and history regard "Jamal the Unfortunate" as the first novel in the classical sense of the term written in the Kazakh language. The novel depicts the tragic fate of a young talented woman in traditional Kazakh society, which was accustomed to treating women as property, and also offers a critique of that society’s social institutions.

The novel was written and published in 1910, after which, for a number of reasons, it was not republished until the early 1990s (in particular, Dulatuly was repressed in 1928 and rehabilitated only much later, in 1988). After the collapse of the USSR, the novel was republished several times in Kazakh, but it was never translated into Russian.

This audiobook presents the first Russian translation of "Jamal the Unfortunate." Translation by Tim Skorenko © 2025. Both the translation and the narration are non-professional and are intended to introduce a wider audience to one of the most important works of Kazakh literature. The cover artwork is also by the translator.

The memoir "From the Yerevan Correctional House" is the second and final major prose work by the renowned Armenian poet and classic of Armenian literature, Yeghishe Charents. In 1926, Charents was imprisoned in the Yerevan Correctional House for inflicting grievous bodily harm on an acquaintance, and later described in detail and with remarkable vividness its inhabitants—their daily life, habits, and worldview. Charents’s memoir stands as a remarkable document of its era and one of the most comprehensive accounts of the Yerevan criminal underworld of the first half of the twentieth century, as well as of human relationships and the atmosphere prevailing in places of detention.

The memoir was first published in 1927 in the Tiflis newspaper "Martakoch," and shortly thereafter as a separate book. In Russian, "From the Yerevan Correctional House" was published only once, in 1975 (Charents, Yeghishe. Prose. Yerevan: Hayastan).

The classic of Armenian literature Hovhannes Tumanyan (1869–1923) is best known for his fairy tales, poems, and narrative poems. Nevertheless, he occasionally turned to prose intended for adult readers and, between 1893 and 1914, published a total of 24 short stories. In Russian, Tumanyan’s stories were published unsystematically in collected works and various selected prose anthologies. This volume is the only complete collection of Tumanyan’s short stories available in Russian.

Contents: “The Poor Man’s Honour,” “Gikor,” “How the Railway Came,” “How Grandfather Gabo Raised Silkworms,” “Two Fathers,” “Ahmad,” “The Bet,” “The Deer,” “Uncle Hechan,” “The Stone Bath,” “The Wolf,” “The Cricket,” “My Friend Neso,” “From the Years of Famine,” “The Shepherd of the Mountains,” “The Death of the Doe,” “Bear Hunt,” “The Mysterious Old Man,” “One of the Days of Khrimyan Hayrik,” “Mother,” “A Merry Night,” “Sent by Allah,” “The Dog,” and “The Lives of the Braves.”

The stories are presented in translations by A. Bayandur, Stepan Shaumyan, M. Yuzbashyan, N. Khachatryan, Ya. Khachatryants, L. Gyulnazaryants, and A. Gyulnazaryants.

The short story “The Lives of the Braves” had not previously been published in Russian. Translation from Armenian © Tim Skorenko, 2025.