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

Nina Gabrielian is a Russian writer of Armenian origin who lives and works in Moscow. 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. In her stories and poems there is particular attention to colour and shape. 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. In this paper I will investigate the way Gabrielian depicts childhood and memory in her literary work.