After attending the Russian Gymnasium of Baku, in 1895, when he was ten, he was sent to the College of Saint Germain in Asnières, near Paris. He continued his studies in Belgium, and, after obtaining a doctorate in literature and philosophy from the Free University (Universite Livre) of Brussels, he spent about a year writing and publishing verse in both French and Russian, delivering lectures on Russian literature and drama, and living a more or less bohemian life among writers and artists. Zarian became involved in the Russian Social Democratic Party, where he became personally acquainted with Vladimir Lenin. After 1909, he was a political exile in Europe, as the tsarist government had reportedly banned his return to the Caucasus because of his revolutionary activities, for which he spent a year and a half in a German jail (1907–08). He published a few poems in Russian in the revolutionary magazine "Raduga" and contributed to Belgian publications with prose, poems and critical essays in French. Speaking of this period in his life, Zarian wrote: "We used to have cheap food with Lenin in a small restaurant in Geneva, and today, a syphilitic boozer with his feet on a chair and hand on revolver is telling me: 'You counter-revolutionary fanatic nationalist Armenian intellectuals are in no position to understand Lenin.'" In addition to Lenin, Zarian also met and befriended such poets, artists, and political thinkers as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Georgi Plekhanov, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Paul Éluard, Fernand Léger, and the renowned Belgian poet and literary critic Emile Verhaeren. It was Verhaeren who advised him to study his own mother tongue and write in the language of his ancestors if he wanted to reveal his true self. Heeding his advice, Zarian studied Classical Armenian and Modern Armenian with the Mekhitarists on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice (1910–1912), where he also published "Three Songs" (1915), a book of poems in Italian (originally written in Armenian), one of which, titled "La Primavera" (Spring), was set to music by Ottorino Respighi and first performed in 1923.