The writer Zabel Yesayan

Zabel Yesayan was a well-known Armenian writer, poet and translator. She was born in 1878 in Constantinople. She was the only woman on the list of Armenian intellectuals marked for arrest in the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

In 1926 Yesayan visited Soviet Armenia, and in 1933 she moved there with her children. She headed the chair of Oriental literature at Yerevan University. Her life was tragically cut short during the Stalinist purges, in 1937 or 1943.

The portrait shows a woman with short hair in a dark dress with an embroidered collar.