Remembering Professor Richard Hovannisian

One may think that 90 years is a long-enough life, but for Professor Hovanesian, 120 years would be too little, because he never retired. He wrote and researched until the end of his life. In 2021, Armenian Communities of Persia/Iran was published under his editorship. A two-volume textbook The Armenian People from Ancient Times to Modern Times was published under his editorship, which my students know well, because I use it as a textbook for the history of the Caucasus.

And those handful of ten books which Richard mentioned when talking about the beginning of his career turned into hundreds of monographs. During my scholarly journeys to the United States, I met Richard’s students and disciples, now over 70 years old, who have staffed the best universities in America. They have become professors, and they have written a good number of books. His legacy is limitless. Now the number of books written about Armenia in Western historiography is comparable to that of great nations.

His research style was encyclopedic and thoroughly precise. One of his friends joked, while editing the monograph, that Richard argued for half an hour about one of the commas, whether it should be put there or not. He wrote with a broad regional and transnational context. Therefore, he wrote about the foreign policy of the first Republic of Georgia much more than Georgian historians had done until very recently. Although he was a patriot of Armenia, his judgments were balanced not only about Georgia, but also about the first Republic of Azerbaijan. He honestly wrote about the arguments of the Georgians during the Armenian-Georgian war and about the arguments of the Azerbaijanis in relation to Karabakh; but he himself, of course, was a patriot of Armenia. He taught me about this: “patriotism is good, but you should also always present the arguments of the other side.”

With his entire career, writing style, and scholarly interests, Richard was, is, and will remain a role model for me. Last year, in one of the interviews, he mentioned that a generation of historians is growing in Georgia, who will become “Georgia’s Richard Hovannisians.” When I heard that, I walked around with a shining face for a week. Yes, we the Georgian historians have to travel Richard’s way. We are decades late, but we need a similar school of historiography which Richard founded for Armenians and our students should publish their books at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Berkeley, like Richard’s students have already done.

I met Professor Hovannisian in 2013. That year we won a summer school grant and held a one-week summer school, “The First Republic of Georgia,” at the National Archives of Georgia. At that time, my young friends and I were generally unknown people, but we managed to invite important international guests. The main one was Richard Hovannisian. We became friends and after that he stood by my side like a grandfather to a grandson. We have exchanged hundreds of letters, and when I was going somewhere abroad, he would send a letter to his academic friends at one or another university to the effect that “my boy is coming and you should see him.”

In 2018, I invited him to Georgia two more times. On May 29, an event dedicated to the centennial of the republics was held in Ilia State University. The speakers were Richard Hovanesian and Stephen Jones (currently Director of Georgian Program at Harvard), and I was privileged to be moderating a discussion between the two major scholars of the South Caucasus republics. Richard did not hesitate to come from California to Tbilisi again in just three weeks for the conference and summer school dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the republics. Based on the reports of this forum, a comprehensive collected volume was published, authored by Steven Jones, Ronald Suny, Winfried Baumgart, Charlotte Alston, Irada Bagirova, Eric Lee, Andrew Andersen, Haji Murad Danogo, Adrian Brisku and Georgian historians of the first Republic (old and new generation) . Richard wrote the foreword for this book and entitled it Unfinished Symphony. So far, it is his only – and worth reading – Georgian publication.