 In 1920 he was accepted to the Kharkov Institute in Ukraine to study agriculture.After graduation in 1923, he worked as an agronomist in Zangezur, a region of Armenia that features prominently in his short stories.From 1926 he settled in Yerevan where he quickly established his reputation as a gifted writer with his first collection of short stories entitled "Mtnadzor [The Dark Valley]".