Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 13, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Diego Benning Wang. Moderated by Elise Giuliano.
In the late nineteenth century, the orally transmitted Armenian legend about the folk hero David of Sassoun seemed doomed to oblivion when Ottoman Armenian clergyman Karekin Srvandzdiants published a tiny booklet containing the story that he had learned by chance. Srvandzdiants noted that he would be happy if the story could reach twenty people. Decades later, this hitherto little-known folk legend would be read, and its main heroes celebrated by tens of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union. Scores of variants of the epic were collected from all over the newly established Soviet Armenia; some of the most revered Soviet poets and linguists produced a collated text of the epic and translated it into dozens of languages. More importantly, David of Sassoun and other heroes of the epic cycle came to symbolize the newly forged Soviet Armenian national character in a vast totalitarian empire whose guiding ideology was inimical to various aspects of Armenian traditions. This lecture will examine the underlying messages of the epic, discuss how Soviet policies helped the epic captivate a large audience in a short period, and analyze the political calculations and ideological justifications behind the promotion of the epic.
Diego Benning Wang is a historian of the Caucasus, Armenia, Central Asia, and the Russian North in the modern period. He received a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, an M.A. from the Harriman Institute, and a B.A. in Russian Studies from New York University. He was a visiting scholar at Harriman in the 2024-2025 academic year and is currently a visiting scholar at the Davis Center at Harvard University and an adjunct professor at Kean University.
