Memoirs of an Armenian Revolutionary, Volume 1 — A Word from the Publishers

The Armenian struggle for liberation was without precedent and without pity.

In the short space of twenty years, the Armenian people, enslaved for centuries, gave birth to fabled heroes by the thousand, who came out against a giant empire, scorning death, in the name of the Fatherland's freedom.

The struggle ran breathless, and in its race it knew resplendent ascents and terrible falls.

Among the Armenian people there arose a generation of fedayis,¹ cast of steel and of granite, in whose veins flowed the blood of David of Sasun.² Like blazing meteors they came and passed across our dark firmament, filling our souls with the divine nectar of pride and of hope.

Who was to write, for the generations to come, the history of those legendary heroes — of many of whom not even the graves are known, nor the names?

Who was to give us their inner life and their dreams?

For once, the God of the Armenians was just toward us: He spared the life of the choicest of the chosen — Rouben, himself a great fedayi and their commander, who, against his own wish, could not fall a sacrifice at the shrine of freedom. By a miracle he came out of fire and sword alive, so that he might give us the life of those legendary giants who, at the price of their death, made the most sublime Armenian Battle for Freedom, in the name of the Fatherland's independence.

For years on end Rouben toiled and wrote: he raised from the dead the fedayis he had loved, described our enchanting fatherland as no one else has been able, and brought back to life our patriarchal world, forever lost, woven of the sunbeams of goodness and of toil.

In the course of the last thirty years a good many memoirs of our revolutionary life have been printed, and nearly all of them, with very few exceptions, revolve around the writer's own person.

Rouben, who has at all times been himself the central and guiding figure, labors in every way to keep his own person and his own work in the shade, and on the contrary brings into full relief, with great love and sincerity, the part played by the humble heroes.

These admirable memoirs of Rouben's have an artistic value as well as a great historical one, and in publishing them we are confident that the generations to come, and the historians, will find in them an inexhaustible spring — for analyzing the events of our time, and for taking pride in them and drawing inspiration from them.

With this printing we pay, at the same time, our tribute of gratitude and of love to the memory of the great Armenian, the great patriot, and the great revolutionary.

The Publishers: