Background and career
Bedros Tourian (also spelled Petros Duryan, Turian, Armenian: Պետրոս Դուրեան; 1 June [O.S. 20 May] 1851 – 2 February [O.S. 21 January] 1872) was an Armenian poet, playwright and actor. His career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty, but he gained lasting renown for his highly personal and innovative lyric poetry.
Tourian was born into a poor family in Scutari near Constantinople. He showed interest in theater and began translating plays from French to Armenian while still in school. He wrote his first known poem at the age of thirteen and his first play at fifteen. Despite the urging of his relatives to abandon art and writing for more gainful employment, he continued to write poetry and compose and perform in plays. He became famous in his lifetime as a playwright (while earning little money from his plays), although since his death his poetry has come to be valued more highly than his plays. He fell ill from tuberculosis in 1871 and died the next year.
Tourian wrote poems on themes of patriotism, unrequited love, premature death, nature, and sentiments of loneliness and hopelessness. His poems have been praised for their freedom from convention, their spontaneity, and for bringing the individual's deep emotions and psychology back into Armenian poetry. He has been called the "first great love poet of modern Armenian lyric poetry", and some of his poems have been rated by one critic as among the best ever written in Armenian. Most of his plays are historical tragedies with patriotic themes, although he experimented with the genre of social drama in his last play.
