Mesrop Mashtots
[20] Hrachia Acharian, who authored the most comprehensive study on Mashtots and the Armenian alphabet,[21] defended Koriun's work as the only accurate account.[e] While Koriun, his chief biographer, only refers to him as Mashtots, Movses Khorenatsi[f] and later Armenian historiography predominantly calls him Mesrop.[81] Koryun, his pupil and biographer,[82] writes that Mashtots received a good education and was versed in the Greek and Persian languages.On account of his piety and learning, Mesrop was appointed secretary to King Khosrov IV, in charge of writing royal decrees and edicts in Persian and Greek.Leaving the court, Mashtots took the holy orders and withdrew to a monastery with a few companions, leading a life of great austerity for several years.He himself taught at the Amaras monastery of the Armenian province of Artsakh (located in the contemporary Martuni region of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic).Provided with letters from the Catholicos, he went to Constantinople and obtained from emperor Theodosius the Younger permission to preach and teach in his Armenian possessions.In the midst of his literary labors, Mashtots revisited the districts he had evangelized in his earlier years, and, after the death of Isaac in 439, looked after the spiritual administration of the patriarchate."The result of the work of Isaac and Mesrop", says St. Martin,[85] "was to separate for ever the Armenians from the other peoples of the East, to make of them a distinct nation, and to strengthen them in the Christian Faith by forbidding or rendering profane all the foreign alphabetic scripts which were employed for transcribing the books of the heathens and of the followers of Zoroaster.To Mesrop we owe the preservation of the language and literature of Armenia; but for his work, the people would have been absorbed by the Persians and Syrians, and would have disappeared like so many nations of the East"."[93] Koriun, his biographer, compared Mashtots' return to Armenia after the invention of the alphabet to Moses' descent from Mount Sinai."[96][97] Russell argues that both were visionaries, found a champion for their program in the king, looked to the West, had very strong pro-Hellenic bias, trained the children of pagan priests and assembled their own disciples to spread the faith through learning."[107] Soviet Armenian historiography portrayed Mashtots as a secular figure, in line with the official Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history.Hakob Manandian argued in a 1940 pamphlet that although the invention of the Armenian alphabet by Mashtots was primarily aimed at spreading Christianity, in the long-run it was also politically significant.[108] In a 1991 book Catholicos of Cilicia Karekin I complained that his work was being "depicted with colours of purely political, nationalistic and secular nature."[110] Levon Ter-Petrosyan, philologist and Armenia's first president, postulates that Mashtots and Gregory the Illuminator had the most influence on the course of Armenian history."[112] Zekiyan argues that Mashtots laid the foundations of a national ideology, "which gave the Armenians a qualitatively new self-awareness [...] in the wider cultural-anthropological sense of a vision of the world, or Weltanschauung.[119] In May 1962 the 1600th anniversary of the birth of Mashtots was marked with "massive official celebrations" in Soviet Armenia, which had a "powerful impact on Armenian national pride.[146] It was also celebrated in Moscow's House of the Unions where Armenian (Silva Kaputikyan and Nairi Zarian) and Soviet (Vadim Kozhevnikov, Marietta Shaginyan, Mykola Bazhan, Andrei Lupan) writers gave speeches.The Order of St. Mesrop Mashtots, awarded for "outstanding achievements" in science, education, healthcare, and culture,[147] was established by the Armenian government in 1993.[s] Van Khachatur (Vanik Khachatryan) created a panel painting of Mashtots in 1958–59 for the entrance hall of the Armenian Academy of Sciences in Yerevan.[183] In 1981 a tapestry titled The Armenian Alphabet, where Mashtots is the central figure, was completed by French weavers based on a painting by Grigor Khanjyan.[186][185] The most recognizable statue of Mashtots, depicted with his disciple and biographer Koriun, is located in front of the Matenadaran and was erected by Ghukas Chubaryan in 1962.[187] A statue of Mashtots and Sahak, erected by Ara Sargsyan in the 1940s,[u] was put up in front of the main campus of Yerevan State University in 2002.[199][200] In Akhalkalaki, the center of the Armenian-populated Javakheti (Javakhk) region of Georgia, the statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin was replaced with that of Mashtots in 1992.[205] Paruyr Sevak, a celebrated Soviet Armenian poet, characterized Mashtots as a great statesman who won a "bloodless battle, which cannot be compared to any of the victories of our glorious commanders" in a 1962 poem.[209] A popular poem by Silva Kaputikyan, "Words for my Son", reads: "By Mesrop's holy genius, it [the Armenian language] has become letter and parchment; it has become hope, become a flag.
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