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:
“But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“A personality is an indefinite quantum of traits which is subject to constant flux, change, and growth from the birth of the individual in the world to his death. A character, on the other hand, is a fixed and definite quantum of traits which, though it may be interpreted with slight differences from age to age and actor to actor, is nevertheless in its essentials forever fixed.”
—Hubert C. Heffner (1901–1985)