Sona Van (actually: Ter-Howhannisjan) is a famous Armenian poet and traveler. She was born in Yerevan, Armenia. Her grandfather, a respected Armenian clergyman from the East Anatolian city of Van (hence, the poet's literary pseudonym) in the terrible 1915, stayed in Istanbul with a large part of his family. They were all eyewitnesses or even victims of the atrocities of Young Turkish militias.
Returning to her thoughts about those terrible times, Sona makes a kind of poetic examination of conscience. In the sketch "Biography of the whole century and even longer" "he writes: "Since I am fully convinced that no one has the right to touch on this subject except the survivors who witnessed these events, like a criminal caught red-handed, I tear my notes to shreds and throw them into the bin. I am sure that this, sample of my autobiography related to the history of the Great Slaughter would have, met the same fate if its motive was to seek publicity or vent for poetic eloquence, not the silence of skulls filled with sand for a hundred years and the terrifying, unnatural sound of a real river of blood, hurting my ears every day.
The above words also largely determine the poetic composition "Libretto for the Desert" and the shape of the lyrical heroine of the entire volume, the sound of which is muted, devoid of exaltation and pathos. This is not a sketch for the landscape of the apocalypse, it is an attempt to view suffering solely through the reflections of pain in the pupils of an exceptionally sensitive medium: the pain of the world in a woman's pupils.
