Khachik Dashtents was born in a shepherd's family on May 25, 1910 in the Dashtadem village of Ottoman Empire's Bitlis Vilayet in Western Armenia (current-day Turkey). After the Armenian Genocide, he moved to Soviet Armenia and graduated from the Yerevan State University (1932), and then from the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages. Dashtents has authored poetry collections ("Songbook", 1932; "Spring Songs", 1934; "Fire", 1936), "Tigran the Great," a historical drama (1947), translations of William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Saroyan. The "Khodedan" (1950) and "Call of Plowmen" (published posthumously, in 1979) novels tell the tragic story of Western Armenians during World War I.
