Personality
Shiraz was known for his good sense of humour. In early 1960s, John Steinbeck visited poet's apartment in Yerevan, and then wrote in a letter: "...men are closest together when they laugh together. And I remember that in Yerevan we laughed together a great deal."
Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Alexander Gitovich dedicated poems to Shiraz.
Shiraz was an anti-establishment poet who was very popular with the people of Soviet Armenia but fought against its corrupt Soviet leadership all his life. When in 1974 the known critic Suren Aghababyan has brought to Shiraz the news about awarding of the Order of Lenin, the answer has followed: "And what they want in exchange? To buy my silence?"
Read more about this topic: Hovhannes Shiraz
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)