The Life and Times of Yekaterina Bahaturian Feminist Prose in the South Caucasus under Tsarist and Soviet Regimes

The Life and Times of Yekaterina Bahaturian recovers the life and work of an early twentieth-century Armenian writer long overlooked in literary and historical scholarship. Based on extensive archival research as well as contemporary Armenian and Russian-language periodicals, the book offers both a historical and literary study alongside an anthology of translated texts. It provides critical analysis of Yekaterina Bahaturian’s writings while presenting ten English translations of her short prose for the first time. Born in 1870 in Vararakn, in the Mountainous Karabakh region, and raised in Shushi, her early life unfolded in a territory that today lies within Azerbaijan but has long been contested between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Over time, her life extended across Soviet South Caucasus cities of Baku, Tiflis, and Yerevan, reflecting the instability and mobility produced by war, empire, and revolution. Despite her literary promise and recognition as the first Armenian woman playwright, whose works were staged in multiple cities, Bahaturian spent her final years in Tiflis in conditions of poverty and marginalization, dying in relative obscurity in 1944. The book illuminates how women writers negotiated artistic ambition, patriarchal constraint, and political upheaval, contributing to Armenian, Russian imperial, and Soviet literary and feminist histories, as well as to the historiography of transimperial Armenian women’s writing. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Armenian studies, Russian and Soviet history, gender and feminist studies, and comparative literature, while also offering general readers access to a previously overlooked literary voice and a deeper understanding of women’s intellectual and creative lives in the South Caucasus.