Under Children's Eyes: Armenia in Nina Gabrielian's Work

Under chidren’s Eyes: Armenia in Nina Gabrielian’s work Nina Gabrielian is a Russian writer of Armenian origin who lives and works in Moscow. She began her career as a writer in the eighties. She has published collections of poems, stories and critical essays. She is also a fine painter and from the early 2000s she has taken part in several exhibitions collective and personal as well. The imaginative world of her paintings is permeated by the memory of Armenia. The bright colours of landscapes and still-lives merge with the images of mournful women with their heads covered by black scarves. In her stories and poems there is particular attention to colour and shape, as well as the world of childhood. In some of her stories and poems the lyrical hero is constantly recovering the collective memory of the Armenian genocide, which can take the deceptively innocent appearance of a children’s game, as in the story “Hide and Seek” (Igra v priatki). In this paper I investigate the way Gabrielian depicts childhood and memory in her literary work.