“Hrant Ignatovich, we met exactly three years ago. What has changed since then for the country, Armenian literature and you personally?”
“Nothing has changed. Like a buffalo in a swamp, we sink deeper. Ethically, it is right that we do not acknowledge this reality, because words spoken and unspoken produce different responses. So it is good that we do not consider ourselves buffaloes drowning in a swamp.”
“Today our people live by the principle, ‘Whoever can, save yourself.’ What will stop the undiminishing flow of emigration?”
“If we compare the twenties and the nineties, in the first case the entire Armenian people, with few exceptions, aspired towards Soviet Armenia. But that epoch ended, and a period of the opposite aspiration began: out of the country. Neither dictatorship nor the Iron Curtain could restrain people… We entered the new times defeated. Our worker lost to another worker, our engineer to another engineer, our writer to another writer. We must withstand the test of competition, shake ourselves up and join the march of the world’s other peoples. It cannot be that a people and a state exist and suddenly disappear forever. We have lost, and continue to lose, our ambitions to stand among the world’s powerful peoples, the French or the Germans, but we will certainly find our place in the common parade of peoples.”
“Byron considered democracy an aristocracy of murderers, and Stendhal a lower form of government. Was it not a mistake to abandon the totalitarianism that had become so familiar, when others thought and decided for us, and we merely had to work?”
“Absolutely not. Even today I see yesterday’s lazy, weak-willed society, when the minimum of our capabilities was required of us. I believe an aristocrat lives within every person, and I would never allow myself to speak so harshly of people and society, although I see what the crowd does today. Totalitarianism manifested itself in all its forms in our country and died, exhausting itself; it ended in defeat. Yet a beautiful, Christian community of people had formed, unlike the present jungle. The painter Henrik Siravyan, who recently left us, belonged to that community.”
“What did the thirteenth congress of the Writers’ Union of Armenia reveal? Why were your fellow writers so angry and agitated?”
“The question is broad and substantial. Only yesterday writers were a caste earning their daily bread with the pen; today neither book nor word provides bread. At the same time, literature’s competitiveness requires professionals to attend solely to their work and books to circulate in society. But today there is neither bread nor the dissemination of literary works. There were complaints that the republic’s literary life could be better organised. Well, those are good ambitions; let them try.”
“We were long consoled by the image of the positive hero, in life and literature. But perhaps the contemporary French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet is right in asserting: ‘A living hero can only be negative. With all his vital energy, all his biography and merits—intellectual, erotic, muscular, oh Sisyphus!—he opposes the positive hero.’ What does ‘positive hero’ mean to you?”
“Was Christ a positive hero in life? I do not know why the French writer said that, but I believe God lives in each of us. It is solely through the laziness of our thought that we judge a person positively after death, negatively and as evil in life. Today we must see Garegin Nzhdeh in Vazgen Sargsyan, see Vardan Mamikonyan in today’s commander. I am certain my children are more beautiful than my grandfathers, and their children will be more beautiful than I am.”
“Recently a Russian man on television declared that the future of art belongs to dilettante savages. Seeing today’s young people, one begins to believe it. Perhaps the weight of intellect and erudition really does pull one down?”
“That is a question from fifteen years ago, when mass culture surged forth and we thought the movement could be halted. Even in Europe they thought so and, concerned for cultural horizons, fought that invasion. But the struggle is doomed to defeat. Mass culture will capture the whole world, and on that level new intellectuals, new individual personalities will be born. Kostan Zaryan said yesterday’s culture was the culture of shepherds, while today’s is part of civilisation. Today culture’s ultimate aim—to inspire humanity with emotional and intellectual strength—is achieved by other routes. Christianity destroyed classical culture, compressed space; it seemed the end of the Aristotles, but on that flat expanse of water new names arose. Undoubtedly, times and nations, languages, have always striven with a sense of honour not to remain mute and unexpressed. The world map is not a desert, and individual personalities are many. A nation must not be silent: Shakespeare did not silence the Russians—Pushkin was born; in Armenia, Tumanyan…”
“How do you regard the celebrations of Christianity’s 1,700th anniversary in Armenia? I confess that the clamour of festivities instinctively alarms me, because a person’s inner world, the soul, should be touched quietly, gently and unobtrusively.”
“Christianity and the church should occupy as much space in our life as they have earned. We should therefore neither become excessively enthusiastic about the coming celebrations nor condemn them, because the occasion brings our nation and state together, attracts the world community’s attention and takes us into the international arena.”
“What is your main conclusion from the life you have lived? What are the results?”
“I cannot sum things up. Looking at what the state and government have done or left undone, I can only say whether I would have done this or that. I considered myself one of the nation’s intellectuals, but what I thought about the nation and the state was done—in Azerbaijan, Chechnya or Turkmenistan—and was defeated. And it is scarcely possible to call what we have not done nationally a good reality. So many mistakes were made… Why did we delay and not enter Nakhichevan? We understood too late that we must resolve our own questions ourselves. But many of us still have not realised this and remain in yesterday…”
“Can truth and goodness exist outside us, while real life exists only in our soul?”
“The objective world is our subjective perception. As we are, so is the world. Not long ago I used to go out onto the balcony and watch two stray puppies running around our courtyard. One disappeared; we thought it had been killed. And nothing essential changed for the second puppy: it continued playing with an imaginary friend, dancing the same playful dances, because the living puppy had merely been its imagination. So the real world is the image of our perceptions.”
“Today humanity and the whole world are already playing ‘To be or not to be,’ choosing between ‘marching on forever or disappearing for good.’ What do you foresee? As a writer, what does your creative instinct tell you?”
“I think your question is rather that of an inhabitant of a country under strain. But a person, even my enemy, is not so foolish and mad as not to step away from the edge of the abyss. Though many examples show how the genie is let out of the bottle, there are more examples of how he is kept locked up, and that expresses love, patience and reason. Illusion is a necessary component of human existence. Without illusion there would be black death. Illusion becomes a form of life, and in that case my creative instinct will surrender to illusion. Long live that deception which becomes reality, through which life continues! We must ‘be’ through deception; I accept nothing else. What good comes from accepting destruction, denying eternal life? The benefit of that deception is immense: a calm, peaceful people confident of future prosperity. Humanity must have the strength to evade destruction, the apocalypse, through deception.”
“Marshak writes: ‘Let the actor playing a king not be tempted by the marten’s fur.’ Yet selflessness turns into either foolishness or cowardice. And a living person cannot help being tempted by beauty, fame, wealth and honour. What can hold someone back from all this?”
“Not quite so comprehensively, but this is what I think: humanity is governed by images, and today we, the Armenian people, carry not our own image but the image of wealth and beauty, a picture of the world that came to us from Hollywood and compelled us to accept it. Socialism was weakly expressed in us, but it did not allow a person to be cast out. We should have woven our flag from the ideas of socialism, Christianity and justice. If in the beginning was the word, why did the system collapse? Because it was an incomplete, unfree word. We lost the cultural struggle because writers, painters and actors became the system’s ideologues, content with the role of decorators. So we had no image of our own, and we were given a ready-made image that absolutised the self, beauty and wealth. Christ’s resolve was needed to hold a person back from passions and temptations. To someone brought up in the spirit of ‘we,’ the ‘I’ came from across the ocean, from Europe; both totalitarian Christianity and totalitarian Communism submit to the power of the society of ‘I.’”
“Today concepts such as freedom, independence and national ideology are perceived as myths, and discredited myths at that. What new myths can tomorrow offer us?”
“My colleagues in the diaspora will answer that better; I have always remained behind them. It seems everything has been made sense of by thought, yet reality remains outside us. We cannot analyse domestic and foreign policy and make it the basis of our actions. The nation showed a weakness of thought in its national idea. If at first the freshness of my perception let me formulate things, today that freshness has gone: I drift with the current, but have no power over time. History’s panorama teaches us: Pan-Slavism collapsed, Pan-Islamism too, and Pan-Turkism will also collapse. The idea of the human being prevails, and there is no higher idea. That is why we must have reverence for each individual person, must preserve the ambition to become a newly appearing Christ, Napoleon, Marx. Today’s world must become the image of a human being freed from national, social and religious chains. After all, only the human being sings, plays and creates…”
Interview by Zulfa Ohanyan.
“Urartu”, No. 21, 2001.